Sparta and Its Law - Eduardo Velasco 2012

Eduardo Velasco
SPARTA
AND ITS LAW
ESPARTA Y SU LEY
2012, Eduardo Velasco
Translated by César Tort

https://chechar.wordpress.com/
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If I had to choose a motto for myself, I would take this
one — “pure, dure, sûre,” [pure, hard, certain] — in
other words: unalterable. I would express by this the
ideal of the Strong, that which nothing brings down,
nothing corrupts, nothing changes; those on whom
one can count, because their life is order and fidelity,
in accord with the eternal.
– Savitri Devi
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CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Origins of Sparta
3. First development of Sparta: the Messenian wars
4. Lycurgus and the Revolution
5. The New Sparta
6. Eugenics and early childrearing
7. The education of children
8. The education of adolescents
9. Adult life
10. Women and marriage
11. The Government
12. On the pagan mentality, the religious sentiment of the Spartans,
and supremacy over Athens
13. The Spartan politics for their inferiors: the crypteia
14. War
15. The battle of Thermopylae as an example of heroism
16. Subsequent history of Sparta
17. The twilight of Sparta
18. The lesson of Sparta
19. The survival of the Spartan archetype
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Introduction
INTRODUCTION
O blessed remote period when a people said to itself: "I will be -
master over peoples!" For, my brothers, the best shall rule, the
best also wills to rule! And where the teaching is different, there -
the best is lacking.
–F. W. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Sparta was the first massive reaction against the inevitable decline
brought about by the comfort of civilization, and as such, there is much
to learn from it in this age of biological and moral degradation induced
by a techno-industrial society. The Spartans really broke away from all
vices produced by civilization, and so placed themselves at the top of the
pyramid of power in their region. All current elite military traditions are
somewhat heirs of what took place in Sparta, and this signals the survival
of the Spartan mission.
In this book we have gathered data from various sources, giving

priority to the classics. The historian and priest of the sanctuary of Apollo
at Delphi, Plutarch (46-125 CE), in his work Ancient Customs of the
Spartans and Life of Lycurgus gives us valuable information about
Spartan life and Spartan laws, and much of what we know about Sparta
we owe to him. Xenophon (430-334 BCE), historian and philosopher
who sent his children to be educated in Sparta, is another good source of
information, in its Constitution of the Lacedaemonians. Plato (427-347
BCE), in his famous Republic shows us the concept of how a higher state
should be ruled, listing many measures that seem directly taken from
Sparta, because it was his inspiration.
Today our indoctrinating academics vaguely teach that Sparta was a

militaristic and brutal state completely turned to power, whose system of
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Introduction
education and training was very hard. We are introduced to the Spartans
roughly as efficient soldiers, crude and mindless, which “were only
interested in war.” This is a deliberately distorted reflection of what they
really were, and it is mainly because we have been taught by some
decadent Athenians, spiced with the bad faith of those who currently
manage the information, who seek to distort history to serve economic
and other types of interests.
The Spartans left an indelible spiritual mark. The simple fact that
even today the adjective “Spartan” designates qualities of hardness,
severity, roughness, strength, stoicism and discipline, and that there are
words that describe the attraction toward Sparta (laconophilia,
philodorism), gives us an idea of the enormous role played by Sparta. It
was much more than just a State: it was an archetype, the maximum
exponent of the warrior doctrine. Beyond the perfect façade of brave men
and athletic women hid the most religious, disciplined and ascetic of all
people of Greece, who cultivated wisdom in a discrete and laconic way,
far from the hustle and urban vulgarity which even then had appeared.
It is impossible to finish this introduction without reference to the

movie 300, even though most of the text was written well before the film
came out in 2007. As you will be reading, you will see that the lifestyle of
the historical Spartans had nothing to do with the characters that this
film presents, which tries to make the Spartans more digestible to us,
introducing them in a more Americanized, sympathetic way to modern
minds, which is not too bad because otherwise the message may not have
passed through. On a higher level, Sparta provides the perfect excuse to
approach important issues.
Eduardo Velasco
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Origins of Sparta
ORIGINS OF SPARTA
Before the great Indo-European invasions, Europe was populated by
various pre-Indo-European peoples, some of whom had advanced
societies, which we are inclined to consider as related to other
civilizations and societies outside Europe.
At first, most of Greece was inhabited by Mediterranean peoples that

later Hellenes invaders would call Pelasgians. Around 2700 BCE, the
Minoan civilization flourished (named in memory of the legendary King
Minos), based on the Mediterranean island of Crete, very influenced by
Babylon and the Chaldeans, clearly related to the Etruscans and even
with Egypt, and known for her telluric “bull worship,” the palace of
Knossos, buildings stripped of fortifications and abundant art spirals,
curves, snakes, women and fish, all of which places this civilization
within the orbit of the cultures of telluric character, focused on Mother
Earth or Magna Mater.
Scope of the Minoan civilization.
According to Greek mythology, as the first peripheral Hellenes were

advancing in Greece and coming into contact with its people, the
Minoans ended up demanding, as an annual tribute fourteen young, male
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Origins of Sparta
Hellenes to be ritually slaughtered (the legend of Theseus, Ariadne, the

labyrinth and the minotaur is reminiscent of this era).
By 2000 BCE there was an invasion by the first Hellenic wave that
opened what in archeology is called the Bronze Age. The Hellenes were
an Indo-European mass that, in successive waves quite separated in time,
invaded Greece from the north. They were tough people; more united,
martial and vigorous than the Pelasgians, and ended up submitting those
lands despite being numerically inferior to the native population. These
Hellenes were the famous Achaean Greeks referred by Homer and the
Egyptian inscriptions. They brought their gods, solar symbols (including
the swastika, later used by Sparta), the chariots, the taste for the amber,
fortified settlements, Indo-European language (Greek, who would end up
imposing itself on the indigenous population), Nordic blood, patriarchy
and hunter-warrior traditions.
The Achaeans settled in Greece, establishing themselves as the

dominant caste, without at first reaching Crete. The first destruction of
the Minoan palaces (around 1700 BCE) was probably due to a large
earthquake of which there is evidence; not Achaean invasion.
The Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, around 1800-1400 BCE.
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Origins of Sparta
The Achaeans, finally, opened the way for the Mycenaean

civilization, centered on the city of Mycenae, Argolis. In 1400 BCE, the
Achaeans took by force the island of Crete, destroying the palaces and
finally ending, to some extent, the Minoan civilization; eventually
adopting some of its outward forms—what many uprooted invaders who
trample a superior, but already declining civilization, do. These Achaeans
were the ones who, around 1260 BCE, besieged and razed Troy in a
crusade of the West-East capable to unite all the Achaeans—generally
prone to war between themselves—in a common enterprise. In the Iliad
Homer describes them as a band of barbarians with mentality and
appearance of Vikings sweeping the refined and civilized Troy. After this
process, the entire western coast of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the
Bosphorus was subject to Greek influence: a process that will have a huge
weight upon history.
Around 1200 BCE there was, again, a huge migration flow. Countless
Indo-European peoples moved to the South in great tumult and to the
East. The entire eastern Mediterranean suffered major seizures under the
so-called “Sea Peoples” and other Indo-European tribes that invaded
Turkey, Palestine, Egypt and the steppes of Eastern Europe, and opened
the archaeological Iron Age in the Eastern Mediterranean.
As for the Mycenaean civilization of the Achaeans, it was also

destroyed by one of these invasions. The apocalyptic references in the
traditional Greek history (fire, destruction, death) made many historians
mistakenly think in large earthquakes or riots. In this legendary invasion,
much larger than the previous, iron weapons were used, superior than
the bronze weapons of the Achaeans. The Dorians, belonging to such
migration and ancestors of the Spartans, broke into Greece with extreme
violence, destroying in their path cities, palaces and villages. The Dorians
took Crete and the Mycenaean civilization of the Achaeans abruptly
disappeared from the archaeological record. Argolis (on Mycenae
ground) never forgot this, and although now with Dorian blood the state
of Argos and its domains would stubbornly oppose the Spartan power in
later centuries.
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Origins of Sparta
The former settlement of the Dorians had been in the Balkans and in
Macedonia, where they lived in a barbarous or semi-barbarous state.
They had not always lived in the area but ended up there as a result of
another migration from further north. The most sensible thesis considers
the place of origin of the Dorians along with the Celts, Italics, Illyrians
and the remaining Greeks, the so-called Tumulus Culture and the latter
Urnfield Cultures and Halstatt Culture: proto-Indo-European
civilizations, tribal and semi-barbarous that flourished in Central Europe
north of the Alps and southern Scandinavia. According to the Greek
historian Herodotus, the Dorians had their primordial home “among the
snows.” Genetically, Dorians seem to belong to R1b paternal lineage, that
dominates Western Europe today.
Across Europe, after the invasions there was a contest (open first
and then more subtle) between the martial mentality of the new invaders
from the North and the native mentality of concupiscence. The East,
Finland, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and Greece were examples of this
struggle, and usually the result was always the same: the Indo-European
invaders prevailed despite their overwhelming numerical inferiority.
Then they settled as nobility over a mob descendant of aboriginals and
subjected peoples. In the Peloponnesus, this latent struggle resulted in
the superhuman fruit of Sparta, just as, later, the struggle between Italic
and Etruscan led to Rome.
Every era and every place has its own master race. At that time and
place the Dorians were the dominant race. Of Nordic appearance, a soul
of ice and fire, an inborn discipline and a brutal warrior vocation so
natural to them distinguished them from the more peaceful natives, fully
dedicated to the pleasures of the lower abdomen. The Dorians in
particular (and among them specifically the Spartans, who kept
themselves strictly separated from the rest of the people) maintained
their original features longer than the other Hellenes: centuries after the
Dorian invasion blond hair and tall stature were still considered the
characteristic of the Spartan. This is because, as in India, the great epic of
ancient invasion remained for a long time in the collective memory of the
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Origins of Sparta
people; and the racism of the Dorians, along with their insistence on
remaining a selected elite, led to a system of racial separation which
preserved for centuries the characteristics of the original invaders.
The name of the Dorians comes from Dorus, son of the legendary
Helen (Helen of Troy was before Helen of Sparta). The aristocrats were
called Heracleidae, as claimed descent also from Heracles, thus
attributing divine ancestry. Divided into three tribes, the Dorians were
led by the royal lineage, as well as oracles and Hellenic priests equivalent
to the Celtic Druids. For the Heracleidae, the invasion of Greece was a
divine command nominally from Apollo “the Hyperborean,” their
favorite god.
During the four centuries, from 1200 BCE to 800 BCE, there was a
stage that modern historiography called “Greek Middle Ages,” when the
Dorians erected themselves as the native aristocracy and formed small
“feudal” kingdoms constantly fighting against each other, as the uprooted
invaders from all eras liked to do. This stage was a heroic, individualistic
age of personal glory, in which the warriors sought a glorious sunset.
Many battles still were decided by a duel of champions: the greatest
warrior of one side faced the best of the other. This represents the heroic
but foolish mentality of the time: “the strong destroy each other and the
weak continue to live.”
By that time Greece had not yet reached the image of the refined
warrior equivalent to the medieval knight: the Dorians were still
barbarians. For better or worse, all great civilizations began with hordes
of warriors and hunters, tightly bound by ties of clan, and strongly
disciplined by a militarized lifestyle. Nietzsche already noted the
importance of the “barbarian” character in the formation of all
aristocracy. For him, even when such invaders are established and form
states, the basic underlying character is still, and subtly, barbaric in the
forms of these raising states.
During the Greek Middle Ages, in 1104 BCE, the Heracleidae

reached the Peloponnesus. Spartan history explained quite correctly that
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Origins of Sparta
the Dorians invaded Greece eighty years after the destruction of Troy
and, led by King Aristodemus, conquered the peninsula. Pausanias
(second century, not to be confused with the Spartan prince who defeated
the Persians at the battle of Plataea), in his Description of Greece, goes
into more detail. He says that the Dorians, from a mountainous region of
northern Greece called Oeta and guided by Hilo, a “son of Heracles”
expelled from the Peloponnesus the Mycenaean Achaeans.
However, an Achaean counteroffensive held them back. Then, in a

final process called Return of the Heracleidae, the Dorians definitely
settled in the Peloponnesus and prevailed over the Achaeans, with great
disturbances in the peninsula. The phrase-dogma of the “Return of the
Heracleidae” was the way the Dorians had to justify the invasion of the
Peloponnesus: noble Dorian families, distantly related to the Achaean
noble families (both Dorians and Achaeans were Greeks), claimed what
“rightfully” was theirs.
The new stream of Indo-European blood, courtesy of the Dorians,

would eventually revitalize the ancient Hellas, keeping it in the spiritual
and physical forefront of the time along with Persia, India, an Egypt that
was not by then what it used to be, and China. In the south of the
Peloponnesus peninsula, the Dorians established their main center, the
city of Sparta, also known by its former name, Lacedaemon. The territory
under the dominion of Sparta was known as Laconia.
The original city of Sparta or Lacedaemon was not properly a city; it

consisted of a “cluster” of five villages (Pitan, Cynosur, Meso, Limnas and
Amiclas, initially military garrisons) different but close and united, each
with its high priest. The settlements always lacked defensive walls,
proudly confident in the discipline and ferocity of their warriors.
Antalcidas went on to say that “the young men are the walls of Sparta,
and the points of their spears its boundaries.” The lack of walls helped
them to stay alert and not allow in any relaxing. Hitler would say, with an
identical mentality: “A too great feeling of security provokes, in the long
run, a relaxation of forces. I think the best wall will always be a wall of
human chests!”
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Origins of Sparta
Sparta, however, was surrounded by natural defenses, as it was

situated in the valley of the river Eurotas, between high mountains, with
the Taygetos mountain range to the west and Parnon at the east.
However, the lack of walls demonstrates the safety and confidence of the
Spartans as well as certain arrogance.
In ancient Hellas three Indo-European streams would end up as the

main ones: Firstly the rough Dorians, who spoke a Greek dialect that
used the a and r. On the other hand, the soft Ionians, who came from a
Greek invasion before the Dorians, dressed in flowing robes, oriental
style, and spoke a kinder Greek dialect to the ear, which employed much
i and the s. Other peoples of Greece were called Aeolians, who spoke a
dialect that seemed a mix of Dorian and Ionian, and came from the
ancient, mixed Achaean and to some extent from the Pelasgians and later
with the invading Dorians and Ionians—thus sometimes also called,
erroneously, Achaeans.
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First development of Sparta: the Messenian wars
FIRST DEVELOPMENT OF SPARTA: THE

MESSENIAN WARS
During the eighth century BCE, Sparta, like other peoples of Hellas,
was a small city-state ruled by a monarchy and aristocratic oligarchy of
Doric descent. Driven by population growth and a need for resources and
power, the Spartans looked to the West and decided that beyond the
mountains Taygetus, in Messenia would create a nation of slaves to serve
them.
The geopolitics of Laconia did not leave them much choice: they
were on a rough terrain and isolated by mountains and a non-navigable
river. Laconia was something like the heartland, or cardial region of the
Peloponnesus: an area inaccessible to any power that used the sea as a
vector to project their power. So it was well protected from abroad, but in
return the Laconians could not afford to sea as the coast was steep and
there was only one suitable site to establish a port at Gythium, 43 km
from the capital (unlike Piraeus, which was very close to Athens).
Therefore, they could not follow the example of the Athenians, who
jumped from island to island, colonizing the coasts and drawing large
amounts of wheat from the north shore of the Black Sea.
On the other hand, the neighboring kingdom of Messenia had the

most fertile plains of Hellas (“good for planting, good for plowing” said
Tyrtaeus; “a happy grassland” the Spartans called it). By annexing it they
would achieve autarkic supply of food and no longer need to rely on
remote territories, trade, merchants, strategic islands, and maritime
straits easy to control by the enemy or naval fleet.
Moreover, they would not cosmopolitanize, as usual with all trading

nations. Sparta, then, was shaping up as a telurocracy—a geopolitical
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power of clearly continental type—opposed to the maritime Athenian

thalassocracy.
Around 743 BCE, at a time when the Messenians were feasting and
offering sacrifices to their gods, Sparta sent three lads dressed as maids.
These little soldiers, well trained, carried short swords under their robes,
and had no trouble infiltrating the carefree party atmosphere in
Messenian territory. From inside they stalked the unarmed Messenia
crowd, and at a given signal they began a bloody carnage in the thick of
the crowd, before the Messenia mass subdued the boys. After the
incident the Messenians grouped and, enraged, armed themselves and
marched into Laconia. In the fight that broke out, one of the kings of
Sparta fell, and the First Messenia War began (described by Tyrtaeus and
Pausanias, who in turn relied on Myron of Priene).
After four years of war and a great battle, neither side emerged
victorious. That was a deaf resistance, guerrilla style, and probably
conventional armies had been relatively disrupted after the first battle.
Although not adopting yet the tactics of the phalanx or Hoplite
equipment, the most decisive actions were hand strikes, raids and sieges.
However, the Messenians had suffered so many losses that a Messenian
warlord, Aristodemus and his men, retreated to a fortress on Mount
Ithome, and visited the oracle for advice. The oracle answered that to
resist the Spartans a maiden of an ancient and respectable Messenian
family should be sacrificed to the gods. Aristodemus, who was to be a
great patriot, did not hesitate to sacrifice his own daughter. When the
Spartans heard this, they rushed to make peace with the Messenians as,
superstitious or not, they attached great importance to such ritual
matters.
After some years, however, the Spartans decided to attack the

Messenians again. There was another great battle, but the victory yet
again did not go for any of the two sides. And since the Messenian king
had fallen, the leader Aristodemus went to reign over the Messenians. In
the fifth year of his reign he was able to expel from his territory the
Spartan forces. However, Aristodemus seemed to be under a dark curse.
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In a Messenian temple a shield fell from the hand of the statue of the
goddess Artemis. The sacrificed daughter of Aristodemus appeared as
ethereal figure and asked him to take off his armor.
Artemis did it, and she crowned him with a golden crown, dressed in
a white robe. According to the mentality of the time, all these omens
meant that the death of Aristodemus was coming. Ancient peoples took
these things very seriously. It was not superstition but the unraveling of
the archetypal signs, repeated on Earth and echoing what was happening
in the sky. Accordingly, black premonitions gravitated around
Aristodemus. A dense depression took over his mind. He began to think
that he and his nation were condemned to slavery. Believing he had
sacrificed his daughter in vain, he committed suicide over her grave. The
Greeks said that “one whom the gods wish to destroy they first make him
crazy.”
The war lasted a total of nineteen years, and it was only after this
time that the Spartans could exterminate Messenian resistance and raze
the fortress of Ithome. Some Messenians fled the Peloponnesian, and
those who remained were treated more harshly than the very Helots of
Laconia. They were relegated to be peasant vassals of Sparta at the
Messenia fertile plain, and also forced them to pay half of the production
of their land to their Spartan masters.
But the Messenians, much more numerous than the Spartans, were
not satisfied with this situation of second-class and submitted people.
Two generations after the First Messenian War a bold leader named
Aristomenes, supported by the states of Argos and Arcadia, preached
rebellion against Sparta. Following this, in the seventh century BCE the
Second Messenian War began. With a band of loyal followers,
Aristomenes starred numerous raids on Spartan territory, even weeping
out two populations.
Three times he celebrated a Hecatomb sacrifice, a ritual only allowed

to perform to those who had killed more than a hundred enemies. The
Messenians, for the first time, used the Hoplite phalanx tactics
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characterized by close order formations, barricading behind a shield wall

from which the spears stabbed with impunity. The Spartans had not yet
adopted this form of combat from the Middle East, and suffered
catastrophic casualties in the Battle of Hysiae.
Sparta then consulted the oracle of Delphi. There they were told to
go to Athens to procure a leader. This was not supposed to please the
Spartans, as their relations with Athens were not good, and neither
pleased the Athenians for the same reason, but both States respected the
decisions of Delphi and did not object. The Athenians, however, acted in
bad faith: they sent a lame teacher called Tyrtaeus (known to posterity as
Tyrtaeus of Sparta), thinking that he would not have value as military
captain.
However, Tyrtaeus was a great poet. His chants of war inflamed the
martial ardor of the Spartans and raised their morale. In the next battle
against the Messenians, the Spartans marched already inflamed and in
phalanx combat, singing his songs. With such impulse they defeated
Aristomenes in the Battle of the Great Pit, forcing the Messenians to
retreat to another mountain fortress called Ira, at whose feet the Spartan
camp was established. This state of siege, in which guerrillas returned
stronger than during the first war, lasted eleven years. Aristomenes often
managed to break the Spartan siege in Ira and head toward Laconia,
subjected to pillage. Twice he was captured by the Spartans and twice
escaped.
The third time was captured along with fifty of his men, and they
were paraded victoriously through Sparta as if they were a Roman
triumph. Then they were taken to the foot of Mount Taygetos and thrown
off a cliff, the famous Kaiada. According to Greek history, only
Aristomenes miraculously survived the fall and was able to leave the
abyss following a fox. Soon, he was in the fortress of Ira in front of his
men.
But the Spartans ended infiltrating a spy into the fortress, and one
night, after Aristomenes returned from one of his raids, the fort was
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betrayed. In the fierce battle that followed it is said Aristomenes was

wounded and, clasping his bravest men, broke the Spartan lines and fled
to Rome, where he died soon after. It is more than likely that this myth
was built to revitalize Messenian pride: even 250 years later it was said
that Aristomenes was seen in a battlefield fighting against the Spartans.
The Spartans conquered by spear and sword enough land to support

all their people and maintain the other peoples subjected. They
subjugated the Messenians, beat hostile crowds far more numerous than
themselves and indisputably subjected them to their rule. Messenian
coastal populations became a sort of middle-class commercial and navy
populations, and the rest of the country, mere Helots (peasant rabble).
Encompassing the entire southern half of the Peloponnesus, including
the original territory of Laconia and the conquered land of Messenia,
Sparta became the largest state in all Hellas by far—three times larger
than the Attic state of Athens.
Unlike other Hellenic states, Sparta had chosen to be a continental

land power of compact territory instead of engaging in seafaring and
colonizing areas outside Greece, as other Hellenic states did in Asia
Minor, Italy, the Black Sea or Africa. At least in part this was due to its
immense agricultural potential: Messenia was the most fertile of the
Greek world by far, while Athens suffered chronic lack of grain and
continuously had to go to the Black Sea coast to look for it. Sparta had no
such problems.
Think for a moment about how these battles, terribly fierce and long,
could have influenced the Spartan character. The Messenian Wars
marked forever their mentality. Ultimately, the teachers of the Spartans
were their own enemies and the wars forced upon them. They were the
ones who instituted in Sparta military paranoia and preparation for
combat that characterized it; who forced Spartan aristocracy enter into
crisis and, by necessity, find the best way to prevail over their enemies.
Sparta would never have been what it became if in combat it had hit a
cowardly people. Holding a long struggle against high-quality elements,
bold and fearsome enemies to boast, aroused the Spartan force. Perhaps
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that is the only advantage of the unfortunate fratricidal wars, so typical of

Europe.
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Lycurgus and the Revolution
LYCURGUS AND THE REVOLUTION

As said, between 1200 and 800 BCE, there were 400 years of “dark
age” or Greek Middle Ages. The men were acting on personal glory; their
behavior was inspired by the legendary feats of ancient individualist
heroes. Blood brothers senselessly killed each other instead of uniting in
a common will and not seeking personal glory but the glory of their
people. Sparta herself was immersed in this heroic but fratricidal system,
where every man was walking his way seeking his own immortality.
Noble Dorians killed each other while their real enemies proliferated.
Sparta was but a realm of many that existed in Hellas, and also pretty
tumultuous and chaotic. But at the end of the dark ages came a figure
that heralded a new era: Lycurgus, the father of Sparta, the spokesman of
Dorian blood: the man who made what Sparta would later become.
After quelling the second Messenian rebellion with great difficulty,

the Spartans found themselves contemplating the disturbing picture of
being on the brink of defeat; very vulnerable, and on the reins of a
resentful and hostile foreign population that surpassed them in quantity
of more than ten to one. And they were not easy slaves to subjugate, but
Greek peoples who retained their identity, pride and will to power. All
Spartans knew full well that the subjugated would rebel again one day
sooner or later and that they must be prepared for the occasion. In this
tense atmosphere, if Sparta could preserve its purity and survive it was
thanks to Lycurgus.
It is not known when Lycurgus lived. Some say he belongs to the

ninth century BCE, that is, before the Messenian wars, others to the
eighth century, and others to the seventh. In any case, his extraordinary
personality is of an ancestral legislator or “giver of tables.” Lycurgus is
half historical and half legendary. His name means “conductor of
wolves.” He was a veteran of the Messenian wars and the Heracleidae,
and belonged to the royal line of the Agis, youngest son of King
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Eunomos, who had softened his regime to please the crowds. But these
crowds were emboldened and the king fell stabbed with a butcher knife.
Polydectes inherited the kingdom, his eldest son, but, having died
suddenly, Lycurgus, his younger brother, succeeded to the throne. His
reign lasted eight months but it was so right, fair and orderly compared
to the previous anarchy that won the respect of his people forever. When
Lycurgus knew that his sister-in-law (the former queen) was pregnant of
his brother and late King, he announced that the fruit of such pregnancy
would inherit the throne, the right thing, and therefore Lycurgus would
become merely regent.
But the queen was an ambitious woman who wanted to continue

enthroned, so she proposed Lycurgus to marry her and get rid of the baby
as soon as he was born, so they could become king and queen for life, and
after them his own descendants. Lycurgus was furious at the proposal
and rejected it vehemently. However, as a negative response would have
meant that the party of the queen rise up in arms, he falsely sent
messengers to accept the proposition. But when the baby was born, he
sent servants with orders that if the child was a girl to be delivered to the
mother; if boy to be handed over to him.
A male baby was born and was delivered as ordered. During a night
he dined with military Spartans leaders and Lycurgus ordered the child
to be brought, with the idea to let the leaders know there was already an
heir. Lifting him with his arms and set him on the Spartan throne, said
“Men of Sparta, here is a king born to us!” And since the heir still had no
name, he named him Charilaus, “joy of the people.” With this gesture,
Lycurgus affirmed his loyalty to the heir and future king and made it
clear that he should be protected, and that he became his guardian and
protector until he was old enough to rule.
Meanwhile, Lycurgus as Regent was highly revered by the people,

who admired his uprightness, honesty and wisdom. The queen mother,
however, had not forgiven his refusal and that he kidnapped and made
Charilaus known. Due to manipulation and intrigues, she spread the
rumor that Lycurgus was conspiring to murder his nephew and become
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king of Sparta. When this rumor reached the ears of Lycurgus, he went
into exile until Charilaus was old enough to reign, marriage and become
heir to the Spartan throne. In his exile Lycurgus traveled through
different kingdoms studying their laws and customs in order to improve
the Spartan after his return. The first country he visited was the island of
Crete, the Dorian settlement after Mycenae and of renowned wisdom,
where he befriended the wise Tales, convincing him to go to Sparta to
help him in his purpose.
Tales appeared in Sparta as a musician-poet, a kind of minstrel,

throwing songs of honor and discipline to the people of Sparta, and
preparing them for what was to come. The greedy and ambitious willfully
abandoned their desire for wealth and material luxuries in the sake of
unity in a common will with their race. Lycurgus also visited Ionia, where
he not only studied Homer, but legend says that he knew him personally
(here it is clear that certain dates do not add up). Lycurgus compiled his
work and then made it known to his people, who liked it very much
initiating the Spartan celebration of Homer. Another legendary feat
attributed to Lycurgus was the founding of the Olympics.
Lycurgus also traveled to Egypt, where he spent time studying the

Army training. He was fascinated by the fact that in Egypt the soldiers
were lifelong soldiers, as in other nations warriors were called to arms in
war and returned to their previous work in peacetime. Although this
certainly was not the only purpose of his trip to Egypt, at the time it was a
place visited by all those who sought initiation of ancient wisdom.
The Spartan Aristocrates says that Lycurgus also traveled to Iberia,

Libya and India, where he met the famous wise gymnosophists, with
whom Alexander would also meet centuries later. The gymnosophist
school valued, among other things, nudity to the inclemency of weather
as a method to tan the skin and make the body and spirit resistant in
general. As we will see later, this idea was greatly appreciated in Spartan
education.
While Lycurgus was out, Sparta declined. The laws were not obeyed
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and there was no executive power to punish offenders. Upright men

longed the time of the regency of Lycurgus and begged him: “It is true we
have kings bearing the marks and assume the titles of royalty, but as for
the qualities of their minds, nothing distinguishes them from their
subjects. Only you have a nature made to rule and a genius to gain
obedience.”
Lycurgus returned to Sparta and his first action was to bring

together thirty of the greatest military leaders to inform them of his
plans. After these men swore loyalty he ordered to join, armed, in the
market square at dawn with their followers to instill terror in the hearts
of those who would reject the changes he planned. He compiled a
blacklist of potential enemies to hunt them down and eliminate if
needed. That day the square was packed with fanatical followers of
Lycurgus, and the effect was so impressive that the king fled to the
temple of Athena, fearing a conspiracy against him. But Lycurgus sent a
messenger to inform him that all he wanted was to introduce new
legislation to improve and strengthen Sparta. Thus reassured, the king
left the temple and headed to the square, and joined the party of
Lycurgus. With Lycurgus, the two kings and thirty military leaders, the
party had thirty-three members.
But even with the support of the king, what Lycurgus had made was
clearly a coup, a conquest of power or imposition of his will: a revolution.
He had united his people, instilling a sense of cohesion that should
characterize any grand alliance. The individual is nothing and the species
everything. Or as Hitler would say to his followers: “You are nothing,
your Volk is everything.”
After developing his laws and make kings sworn they would respect
them, Lycurgus reported that he would travel to the shrine of Delphi (the
most important religious center of Hellas, considered “navel of the
world”) in search of counsel from Apollo, to ratify their decision. Near
Delphi, marginal nucleus of Dorian population in the slopes of Mount
Parnassus, he saw a shrine to this god with a legend that in that spot
Apollo had killed the serpent Python (a telluric idol related to pre-Indo-
- 23 -
European peoples). A whole school was there for all initiatory mysteries
of Delphi. These mysteries were a venerable institution, Dorian to the
core, to which the notables of all Hellas looked for advice, initiation, and
wisdom. It was a highly strategic location: from the sea, the sanctuary
dominates the heights and seems to lie above the navigator, and from
Delphi, everything that comes and leaves the Gulf of Corinth is seen
clearly.
The sanctuary was saying, “Here we are the Greeks, dominating the
naval and the trade traffic it brings, and we are vigilant.” In the temple of
Apollo was a Sibyl, a virgin priestess who believed he had a special bond
with this god and, like him, gifts of clairvoyance that were able to see the
future and make prophecies. After receiving Lycurgus the Sibyl called
him “more god than man” and claimed he was a chosen of the gods, and
announced that his laws were good and blessed his plans to establish the
Spartan constitution, which would make the kingdom of Sparta the most
famous of the world.
This modern reconstruction recreates how the sanctuary of Delphi must

have looked in ancient times. The road is strewn of stony plates that the
Greek city-states donated to the oracle. The plates are adorned with
elaborate writings and long dedications, except the Spartan plate, which
reads: “To the oracle of Delphi, from Sparta.”
- 24 -
With the blessing of the priestess, Lycurgus established the Spartan

constitution and his laws were so harsh and severe that he prohibited
writing them down: only as oral tradition so that, over years of training,
each individual assimilated them in his soul, by practice and
internalization: something which would make him a carrier of such laws
wherever he went and in any situation. His intention was not to create a
mechanical, grid, stiff and cold system, but a living wheel: flexible and
adaptable not only as common sense and logic, but also as an ancestral
intuition and instinct.
By then Sparta was surrounded by hostile neighbors difficult to repel

and possessed some nine thousand, non-militarized men to act in case of
war or crisis. Lycurgus foresaw that if each of them was to be selected
and trained hard in the arts of war since childhood, they would achieve
victory over their opponents in spite of being outnumbered. Over
generations, the people of Sparta would harden so much that would not
be afraid of their enemies, and their fame would spread to the four
cardinal points. Since then, Spartan boys became more than warriors:
natural-born fighters with a lifelong mission, entirely committed in body
and a soul sacrificed in honor of their homeland. They became, then,
soldiers; perhaps the first professional soldiers in Europe.
Lycurgus did not exactly intend establishing a kind of democracy.

On one occasion a man had before him a compliment of democracy,
giving a fiery speech. Lycurgus, having heard all the talk in silence,
replied: “Good, now go and set an example by establishing a democracy
at home.” Keep in mind that even in those ancient “democracies” only
Greek citizens voted, i.e. men of pure Hellenic blood who had reached the
majority of age. They had nothing to do with our modern idea. Despite of
this, there is no shortage of deceivers today who try to sell us that Sparta
was a kind of communist system just because the state was omnipresent
and the Spartans knew how to share among them.
Lycurgus’ revolution was not entirely peaceful. The Spartan people

soon realized that the laws were extremely hard even for them. A
considerable lineage of Dorian Greeks had become accustomed to the
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comfort and luxury that always come victorious when not maintained on
guard. The sober, ascetic and martial socialism preached by Lycurgus,
which required all young men to part from their families and eat with
their comrades, was not well received among many, especially the rich
and affluent. There was a wave of outrage and an angry mob gathered to
protest against Lycurgus. The mob was composed especially by the
former wealthy individuals who found degrading the military rule that
prohibited eating except on a collectively table of comrades in arms.
When Lycurgus appeared, the crowd began to stone him and he was
forced to flee to avoid death by stoning. The angry mob chased him but
Lycurgus—robust despite his age—was so fast that soon after only a
young man named Alexander was at his heels.
When Lycurgus turned to see who was chasing him with such agility,
Alexander struck him in the face with a stick, gouging out an eye.
Lycurgus gave no sign of pain and just stood with his bloodied face to
face his pursuer. When the rest of the crowd arrived they saw what the
young man had done: a venerable old man, standing solemnly before
them, bleeding with an empty eye. Those were very respectful times for
the elderly, especially men as charismatic and noble as Lycurgus.
Instantly they must have felt immense guilt. Embarrassed, the crowd
accompanied Lycurgus to his home to show their apologies, and
delivered Alexander to him to punish him as he saw fit. Lycurgus, now
one-eyed, did not rebuke the young, but he invited Alexander to live with
him as a student. The young man soon learned to admire and emulate
the austere and pure way of life of his mentor. As tradition derived from
that event, the Senators gave up the habit of attending state meetings
with batons.
After the Spartan people swore the laws of Lycurgus, he decided to

leave Sparta for the rest of his days. His mission was accomplished and
he knew it; now he had to die giving an example of a strong will. Feeling
nostalgic for his homeland and being unable to live away from her, he
committed suicide by starvation. A man born for a particular purpose,
once fulfilled that purpose he has no reason to linger earthbound. The
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ritual suicide has been practiced by many exceptional men whose

mission was over, men who, after serving their fate, nothing was left in
the world; they had lost the right to life. Nietzsche also spoke of voluntary
death: “Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth
the precept: “Die at the right time!”
Another version relates that before leaving Delphi, Lycurgus made

the Spartan people swore to follow their laws at least until he returned
from Delphi. And, having committed suicide without ever returning to
Sparta, the Spartans were left with no choice but to always abide by the
laws of Lycurgus.
For Sparta, Lycurgus was something of a precursor, a vanguard

leader, a messenger before his time. He had royal power, and the sacred
charisma of great leaders, kings, saints and emperors, “certain power
that drew the wills” in the words of Plutarch. He came and transformed a
chaotic and overflowing mass with great potential in the most effective
army of Earth. He imprinted his world with a new inertia—his—, and
gave a new aspect: what he wanted. After his death, a temple was erected
in his honor and he was worshiped like a god. And it was from his time
that not only Sparta but all Greece shone again: the beginnings of the
Classic Age.
Xenophon greatly admired Lycurgus saying that he “reached the

highest limit of wisdom” (Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, 1). Savitri
Devi referred to him as “the divine Lycurgus” and recalled that “the laws
of Lycurgus had been dictated by Apollo at Delphi” (The Hyperborean).
Gobineau appreciated the salvation led by the legislation of Lycurgus:
“The Spartans were few in number but big-hearted, greedy and violent: a
bad legislation would have turned them into poor devils. Lycurgus
transformed them into heroic bandits” (An Essay on the Inequality of
the Human Races, book I, chapter V).
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The New Sparta
THE NEW SPARTA

Forced to learn lessons after their very long wars with the
Messenians, and illuminated by the laws of Lycurgus, the Spartans
proceeded to build an army-camp nation. It was the knowledge of the
power of subversion of the enemy and having been about to fall into their
hands which made Sparta what later came to be. It was the paranoia of
security, the distrust of the submitted peoples, what wrought Sparta over
other Hellenic states and made them surrender to Lycurgus. As the
Spartans were obsessed that their subjects, much more numerous, might
rebel against their authority again, they chose to harden themselves and
raise a new type of man under an authoritarian, totalitarian, militaristic,
incorruptible and unquestionable power that they should obey blindly.
Thereafter, the laws of Lycurgus acquired their greatest splendor. This
was the period from which Sparta was unique in Hellas, the period in
which “something changed,” the time when the people of Sparta, quietly
and discreetly, suffered the strangest of transformations.
What was precisely this mutation? Among other things, the Spartans
learned to direct their aggression not only against their enemies and
rivals, but primarily against themselves and their peers in order to
stimulate, purify and perfect themselves. In addition to tightening the
practitioner, such behavior subtly loomed in the minds of the enemies
the subconscious question, “If you do this to yourself, what will you do to
your enemies?” Thus was born, then, military asceticism.
The Spartans were militarized. All the people went on organizational

mood. Sparta became socialist and totalitarian—understood in its
original sense of a civilization organized and disciplined by a gifted elite,
formed with its best sons, and based on value-blood-spiritual-biological
criteria. Such socialism is something that only could have taken place in
the Iron Age, as it tried to bring together what was broken, and was more
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The New Sparta
like an aristocracy than a democracy. Spengler described this type of

militarist-imperialist-patriarchal system in his Prussianism and
Socialism, noting how this system resurfaces again and again in history,
incarnating in the larger towns and leading to empires. (Spengler
distinguishes four superior socialisms: the Roman Empire, the Spanish
Empire, the British Empire and Prussia, which resulted in the Second
Reich. We would add two more socialisms: Sparta and the Third Reich.)
The caste organization in Sparta was tripartite: warriors, “bourgeois”

and slaves.
(1) The Spartiates (Greek: Σπαρτιάται, “Spartans”). The upper class

was that of the Astoi, Damos or citizens: the aristocracy, consisting of
Dorian Spartans of pure lineage who owned kleros (a package of land)
and that called themselves Spartiates or Homoioi (the same). To be
“equal,” however, one had to be part of that jealous clan. That closed,
selective and elitist Order was the aristocracy of Sparta, which itself was
strongly hierarchical and required as a condition of membership being
born within a pure-blooded Spartan family, passing through strict
eugenics (from the Greek word meaning “good birth”) and having passed
awful trials during instruction. Only Spartan men, brutally trained and
militarized to the core, were able to bear arms; though forbidden to fight
each other in any way that was not combat. They could not afford the
honor duels where men necessary fall instead of defending their country.
The custom of calling themselves “equal” is rooted in the collective

unconscious of Indo-Europeans, as the Romans called each other “peers”
like the English aristocrats, a word of the same meaning. All this reveals a
sanctification of what is one’s own and similar, as well as a disregard for
the foreign. In this establishment, the elite all Hippeis aspired was an
elite guard of 300 men under 30 years.
The Spartiates were the descendants of the old army of Dorian

invaders and their families, that is, the warrior nobility of the ancient
Dorians: maybe the best blood of Hellas. They formed, therefore, the
actual Spartan warrior caste, where there also came all priests. The caste
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The New Sparta
of citizens, including women and children, never had more than 20,000
members. They were ten times less than the helots.
(2) The Perioeci (or perioikoi) means peripheral, people around,

neighbors. They formed the middle class, a kind of bourgeoisie. They
lived in villages with local government, without autonomy in military and
foreign policy, and engaged mainly in trading, blacksmithing and crafts,
activities that were forbidden to the Spartans. The perioeci, then, were
those who were in charge of the money and the “logistics.” They were
probably descendants of the lower strata of the ancient Dorian
population mixed with the Achaeans, who in turn had previously
dominated the Pelasgians and were mixed to some extent with them.
They also came from people who had not resisted Sparta during the
process of defining the polis. All coastal cities had Messenian perioeci
status. The perioeci were entitled to a small kleros, lower in quality than
the plain plots of Messenia, and they often supervised the helots, acting
as intermediaries or foremen between them and the Spartans. They also
constituted the crew of the navy (both commercial and naval war). The
intermediaries between the perioeci and the Spartans were the
Harmosts, twenty Spartans who administered the perioeci. Through
them came to Sparta the food, weapons and craft goods.
(3) The Helots: Also called heílotes (“captives”), were at the bottom
of social stratification. Most were Messenians, Pelasgians and other pre-
Indo-Europeans in Greece, or mixtures between them. Their condition
was dedicated servants to work the fields in perpetuity, but allowed to
have possessions, that is, private property. A fixed amount of their crops
was destined for their Spartan master, and the rest for them.
The helots were legally tied to the land and were forbidden to leave
the kleros they cultivated, although it was forbidden to expel them from
it. As the status was not slavery, they could not be bought or sold. Thanks
to these feudal measures Sparta never had to import large numbers of
foreign slaves, as Athens ended up doing.
Helots mortally hated the arrogant Spartan nobility (Cinadon said
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The New Sparta
they wanted to “eat them raw”), for which were often despised and
humiliated. Only the unity, the savagery, the warlike character, and the
organizational capacity and cruelty of the Spartan elite prevented them
from being in continual rebellion. Because whenever a Spartiate ran into
them they knew they were before a being who would have no difficulty in
killing many with his own hands. This made the helot respect and fear
the Spartiate, and Sparta was doing whatever necessary to cultivate this
image. In Sparta, the castes knew each other: helots knew that the
Spartans were superior and the Spartans knew the helots were their
inferiors.
Helot numbers, according to the Greek historian Thucydides (460-

395 BCE), ranged between 150,000 and 200,000. As markers of identity
they should carry a shaved head, leather clothes and kyne: a dog-skin
cap. Failing to comply to these outfits was punished with the penalty of
death and a fine for the master of the helot.
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Eugenics and early childrearing
EUGENICS AND EARLY CHILDREARING

The Spartan upbringing exudes what Nietzsche called “master
morality” referring to the superior man, as opposed to “slave morality”
that, for example, Christianity uses. What the Spartans did was to
maximize natural selection to obtain a race of perfect men and women.
Today, the cult of perfection raises uproar among the champions of the
politically correct, always happy to say that perfection is unattainable,
thereby seeking to justify and excuse their own laziness and even avoid
approaching the subject. But Lycurgus and his disciples had
contemplated this ideal of perfection as a goal and to achieve it they
renounced all scruple adopting a detached philosophy, “beyond good and
evil” in the vernacular.
It can be said that the system of eugenics preceded even birth,

because the young pregnant maid and future mother practiced special
exercises designed to encourage that their future child was born healthy
and strong, and that labor was easy. There is nothing more insane than
the present day, when women who have not played sports in their lives
are forced to give birth in traumatic ways without the necessary physical
and mental preparation, like a soldier going to war without military
training.
Once the baby was born, the mother bathed him in wine. According
to the Spartan custom body contact with the wine made the epileptics,
decrepit and sickly enter into convulsions and fainted, so that the weak
died soon, or at least could be identified for disposal, but the strong were
as hardened steel. This may seem a kind of baseless superstition, but
Aristotle himself defended it and the French Enlightenment criticized as
“irrational” the peasant custom of bathing newborns with water with
wine: a sign that in the 18th century rural France the custom continued.
We now know, for example, that a bath of alcohol hardens the feet,
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preparing them to support prolonged activity. We also know that red

wine contains tannins, substances of plant origin that are used for
tanning leather and other animal skins and make them tough and
resistant to extreme temperatures and microbial invasions.
If the baby passed the test, he was taken by his father to the Lesjé
(“porch”) and inspected by a council of wise elders to judge his health
and strength, and to determine whether it would be able to withstand a
Spartan life. All babies that were not healthy, beautiful and strong were
taken to Apothetae (“place of rejection”) on the Eastern slope of Mount
Taygetos (2407 meters high), from which were thrown into Kaiada
(Spartan equivalent to the Roman Tarpeian Rock), a pit located 10 km
northwest of Sparta. To this day, Kaiada is a place that has always been
surrounded by sinister legends. Not only defective children were thrown
into the depths, but also enemies of the state (cowards, traitors,
Messenians rebels and suspects) and some prisoners of war. Recently
numerous skeletons have been discovered buried there, including women
and children.
At other times the defective were delivered to the helots to be raised

as slaves, but maybe this should be read that sometimes a caring
shepherd (or rather a pastor needed for labor) picked up a baby who had
been abandoned to the elements to die, taking him home and rising him
as a son.
Let us recall, moreover, that the ancient Germans abandoned

defective babies in the woods to be devoured by wolves. In the SS, babies
being born deformed, weak or sick were stifled at birth, and subsequently
informed the parents that the child was stillborn. According to Plutarch,
for the Spartans, “leaving alive a being that was not healthy and strong
from the beginning did not benefit either the State or the individual
himself.” Under this principle there were executed, in an act of true
compassion, all babies who were not perfectly healthy. Along with
eugenics this was aristogenesis (“best birth” or “birth of the best”).
What Nature usually has done in a slow and painful way the
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Spartans did so quickly and almost painlessly, saving unnecessary work

and suffering. Rather than ignoring the laws of nature—as does the
modern techno-industrial society by getting into the red with Nature and
the future—, the Spartans rose Nature’s laws to the maximum exponent,
and created a world where it was impossible to escape from them.
Most Hellenic States (like all Indo-European peoples of antiquity, as

well as many non-Indo-European) followed similar eugenic-selection
tactics in which it was assumed that the right to life was not for everyone,
but that it must be earned proving oneself strong and healthy. This idea
comes from the unconscious conviction that the people to which one
belongs has internalized a pact with Nature. In the rest of Greece,
eugenics was optional and the decision was up to the fathers, so that the
babies were selected privately as a domestic policy. In Sparta, on the
other hand, the selection was a fully institutionalized state policy. The
Spartans saw in these measures a matter of life and death, and survival in
terms of community of blood. They assumed these measures with
conviction, because in the past the measures had helped them to
overcome extremely adverse situations. Its aim was to ensure that only
the fit survive and favor evolution, thus maintaining a high biological
level for the country and, on this basis, make an improvement on all
levels.
Babies who survived the selection were returned to their mothers

and incorporated into a male or female brotherhood according to their
sex—usually the same one to which belonged his father or mother. Little
or nothing is known about these brotherhoods, maybe guilds where
children were initiated into religious worship. After being accepted into
this fraternity, they went to live with their mothers and nannies, growing
up among women up to their seventh year.
During these seven years, the female influence would not soften the
children, as these were women who could raise their offspring without
softening them. Spartan mothers and nannies were an example of solid
maternity: harsh young, severe, and virtuous women imbued with the
profound importance and sacredness of their mission. They had been
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trained since birth to be real women—to be mothers. Any excessive

tenderness or compassion for their child was removed. If the baby was
defective he should be killed, and if not, should be tanned as soon as
possible to be able to withstand a Spartan life. The first years of the
existence of a toddler marked him for the rest of his life and this was
understood by the Spartan women, who carefully applied themselves into
the task of raising men and women.
Instead of swaddling the babies in bandages, warm clothes, diapers

and blankets like larvae, the nursing mothers of Sparta put them on
supple, thin and light fabrics; freeing the limbs so they could move them
at will and experience the freedom of the body. They knew that babies
have a fresher and intact immune system than adults, and if they were
taught to endure cold and heat at an early age, not only they would not
resent it, but would harden them and make them more immune in the
future. Instead of giving in to the cries of babies, Spartan women
accustomed them not to complain. Instead of allowing whims for food or
overfeeding them with super-purified, ultra-hyper-sterilized and
disinfected food that made their immune systems lose attention, they fed
them with a coarse and natural diet. Instead of committing the
aberration of feeding them with animal, pasteurized, boiled milk stripped
of its natural qualities, Spartan women nursed their children themselves,
helping to form the maternal bonding.
During the first seven years one more task was ensured so that the
infants faced their fears. Spartan mothers and nannies resorted to
various methods. Instead of allowing babies to develop fear of the dark,
newborns were left in the dark so they could get used to it. Instead of
making the babies feel they do not fend for themselves, the were often
left alone. They were taught not to cry or complain; to be tough and
endure loneliness, although they did remove the objects or impede
situations that could make children upset or cry justifiably.
Little Spartans were not exactly pampered like children today are
overprotected, overfilled with warm clothes, bulky diapers, hats, scarves,
mittens, booties, lace, bells, effeminate and garish designs that make the
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poor creature look like a ridiculous, swollen and multicolored ball:

restricting his growth, stunting his immunity, isolating him from his
environment and preventing feeling it, adapting to it and developing a
complicity with it. They were not surrounded by sycophants at all hours
hanging on their whining. Nor were subjected to concerts of cries,
cuddles and hysterical laughter from unhealthy women: noises that
confuse the child and make him feel uncomfortable and ridiculous.
Spartan mothers did not reprimand their children when they

showed curiosity, or when they ventured or soiled in the field; or when
they went alone or out exploring or playing hurt because that would
hinder their initiative. This custom of over-pampering children and
reproaching when taking risk is not typical of Indo-European,
demanding and manly societies. Spartan children were allowed to
penetrate nature, run through the fields and woods; climb trees, rocks,
getting dirty, bloodied, being together and fighting and walking totally
naked; not letting outdoors a single portion of untanned skin.
All physically and spiritually healthy men felt the call of heroism,
war and weapons from an early age: an instinct that the race has injected
them into the blood to ensure its defense. Far from encouraging a
distaste for violence that is always given to children, the Spartan women
encouraged it when possible. Each time the children looked a Spartan
soldier it was created around him an aura of mystery and adoration: they
admired him and had him as model and example, and wanted to emulate
him soon.
As a result of these wise policies Spartan nurses were famous in all

Hellas, for their ways produced as mature, tough, disciplined and
responsible children that many foreigners rushed to hire their services to
raise their own children under Spartans methods. For example, the
famous Athenian Alcibiades (450-404 BCE), nephew of Pericles and
student of Socrates, was raised by the Spartan nurse Amicla.
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The education of children
THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not
know that it is this discipline alone which has created every
elevation of mankind hitherto?
—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
At seven years of age—the age at which the pituitary and pineal

glands begin to degenerate—, Spartan children were tougher, stronger,
wiser, fiercer and more mature than most adults of today. And even
though they were not men, they were already well prepared for the
arrival of masculinity. At this age—five according to Plutarch—they began
their Agoge, which means training or instruction. (It is intriguing how
this coincided with the learning process of European medieval chivalry,
when at seven children were separated from their families and became
apprentices. Seven years later, at the age of fourteen, passed to be
squires. And seven years later, at twenty-one, they were knighted.)
A motion process was set related to maternal influence—

reminiscence of the time of delivery—, and in a single blow the other,
intangible “umbilical cord” was cut, which still subsisted between mother
and son. Children were torn, therefore, from their mothers and placed
under military tutelage with other children of the same age, under the
command of an instructor, the paidonomos: a kind of supervisor who
was usually an outstanding lad between eighteen and twenty years old
who would soon end his own instruction. When he was absent for some
reason, any citizen (that is, any Spartan male who had already finished
his instruction) could order them whatever, or punish them as he saw fit.
Instruction lasted no more and no less than thirteen years, during which
children were already educated and disciplined by men, in order to
become men.
- 37 -
The Agoge is perhaps the most brutal and effective system of

physical, psychological and spiritual training ever created. The education
that Spartan children received was obviously of paramilitary type, which
in some cases was clearly oriented to guerrilla war in the mountains and
forests, for the child to fuse with nature and feel like the king predator.
For all we know it was a superhuman process, a living hell almost of
spiritual and physical alchemy, infinitely harder than any military
training of the present because it was far more dangerous, lasting
(thirteen years), exhausting, and because the tiniest faults were punished
with huge doses of pain—and because the “recruits” were children of
seven years.
Immediately after entering the Agoge, the first thing done to the
kids was shaving their heads. Certainly that was the most convenient for
those who were destined to move through dense vegetation, bite the mud
and fight each other. But the sacrifice of the hair implied a kind of
“mystical death”: waived possessions, decorations, individuality and
beauty were renounced, even one’s own welfare was neglected (the hair is
important for physical and spiritual health). The “recruits” were
homogenized and given a sense of nakedness, loneliness, helplessness
and of a beginning (babies are born bald), a “start from scratch,”
throwing them sharply to a world of cruelty, pain, resignation and
sacrifice.
This is not isolated or arbitrary. The first armies, composed of many

men who had to live together in a small space, saw the need to keep the
hair short to prevent the spread of lice and disease. Furthermore, a
shaved head must have meant something more to them. The Egyptian
priests of the highest degree, the Roman legionaries and the Templars
also shaved the head as well as, to this day, Buddhist monks and
numerous military units. When a group becomes uniform its members
will not be differentiated anymore by their “personal” appearances or by
their external differentiations, but for the qualities that protrude from
scratch on equal footing with their comrades. Paradoxically,
standardizing a group is the best method to observe carefully what really
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distinguishes individuals.
Children understood what it was suggested: giving up on

themselves, or as Goethe said “give up existence in order to exist.” Only
the one who does not cling pathetically to his life can live as a real man,
and only one who does not cling desperately to his ego and his
individuality may reach a truly consolidated and distinct character.
After shaving the head, children were organized by Agelai (hordes or

bands) in paramilitary style. The hardest, more beautiful, fiercest and
fanatical children (i.e., the “natural leaders”) were made horde chiefs as
soon as identified. In the area of doctrine and morals, the first thing was
to inculcate the recruits love for their horde: a holy obedience without
limits for their instructors and their bosses, and make it clear that the
most important thing was to show immense energy and aggressiveness.
For his brothers his relations were perpetual rivalry and competition.
Those children were treated like men, but those who treated them so
would not lose sight they were still children. They were also stamped with
the mark that distinguishes every fierce and confident puppy of his
abilities: impatience, the desire to demonstrate and be tested, and the
desire to be distinguished by his qualities and merits within his pack.
Inherent to the Spartan instruction was the feeling of selection and

elitism. Would-be candidates were told they were the best of Spartan
childhood, but that they had to prove it, and that not everyone was
worthy of becoming a real Spartan. They got into their heads that they
were not all equal, and therefore were all different. And if they were
different some were better or worse or had different qualities. And, if so,
the best should be over the worst, and each placed in its rightful place
according to their qualities. This is why an Order was named thus.
Children were taught to use the sword, the spear, the dagger and the
shield, and they marched in close formation even in rough terrain,
making the movements with precision and perfect timing. A hardening,
physical processes prevailed and they were delivered to many physical
exercises designed to encourage the development of their strength and
- 39 -
their latent warlike qualities: running, jumping, javelin and disc hurling;
dancing, gymnastics, swimming, wrestling, archery, boxing and hunting
are some examples.
To promote competitiveness and fighting spirit, and to accustom

them to violence and teamwork, hordes of Spartan children were made to
compete with each other in a violent ball game which was basically a
variant, much freer and brutal, of rugby. The players were called sfareis
(ball players). We can imagine those little shaven heads delivering each
other wild jolts in every possible way, colliding, dodging and trying to
fight for coordination, obtaining possession of the ball and taking it to
the agreed target, beyond the opponent’s territory and over the bodies of
the opponent. We almost can, also, hear the thuds, the screams, the
coordination signals, the creaking of the elbows, knees, punches, the
headers, the tackles and sprains there must have happened in that game
that transformed characters and personalities and leaders as a smith.
In the sanctuary of the goddess Artemis took place many melee

fighting rituals among the very young Spartans. They were also faced
without further ado horde against horde, child against child or all against
all, in fierce fights tooth and nail and clean punches to stimulate
aggression, competition and an offensive spirit, to develop their sense of
mastery in the chaos of struggles and to build hierarchies. It is easy to
imagine the chipped teeth, crushed noses and cheekbones, bloody faces
and hands, fainting and open heads in those fierce children fights. In
addition, instructors were responsible for setting them on so that they
measured the forces between them, provided it was only for competition
and desire to excel, and when they saw the foaming of hatred to emerge,
the fight was stopped. Perhaps it would have been normal that at the end
of the fight the opponents would salute or compliment each other,
commenting the fight among them, with their peers and with their
instructors and trying to learn. In Sparta ruled that ancient cult that we
may call “mysteries of the fight.”
Besides boxing and wrestling the Spartans also exercised other

popular martial art in Greece: the pankration. It consisted of a mix of
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boxing and wrestling, similar to the modern disciplines of mixed martial

arts and vale tudo, but more brutal: participants could incorporate into
the bands of their fists the accessories of what they believed was suitable
to increase their offensive power: some added pieces of wood, tin foil and
even lead plates.
The rules were simple: everything was allowed but biting, poking in
the eyes, nose or mouth of the adversary. It was also forbidden to
deliberately kill the opponent, but yet many were those who died in this
bloody sport. In those combats if you could not proclaim a winner before
sunset they resorted to klimax, a solution equivalent to tie on penalties in
soccer games. By turns, each wrestler had the right to hit the other,
without the receiver being allowed to dodge or defend in any way. One
who would strike the blow told his opponent what position he should
take to receive the attack. The goal was to see who first fell out of combat.
Greek history gives us an example with a bout between such and

such Damogenes and Creugas, which reached a “draw,” so klimax was
applied. After drawing lots, the first to hit was Creugas, who asked his
opponent to come down the arms, so that he gave him a powerful punch
in the face. Damogenes received the tremendous blow with dignity, after
which he asked Creugas lift his left arm. Immediately afterwards he
inserted his fingers violently under his ribs and tore the bowels out.
The pacifists and progressives of today that praise Greece should

know that force, ferocity and violence were worshiped, in addition to
wisdom. The Greeks philosophized and were “civilized,” yes, but when
needed (or just as a hobby) they knew how to be perfect animals. That
was their duality—a duality of union, not separation, a duality that
sought the perfect integration of mind and body, light in darkness,
overcoming their separation.
In all the struggles, battles, competitions and games, the instructors

put great attention to distinguish whether each child’s screams were of
anger, stress or aggression; or of pain and fear in which case they were
punished. If a boy complained to his father that he had been hit by
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another child, his father gave him a beating for snitching and failing to
seek life: “Complaining is of no use at all: it is something that comes from
weakness.” And that weakness, in a Spartan, was unacceptable. As said,
all citizens had the right to reprimand the children, so that parents had
authority over their own children and those of others.
Thus, each parent treated other children as he wanted others treat

his, as Xenophon observed. If a child, then, complained to his father that
a citizen had given him lashes, the father whipped him even more. In
Sparta all was this rotund, blunt, brutal and simple. Indeed, every
Spartan child called “father” any adult male, similar to when today we
respectfully call “grandfather” an elderly stranger. This habit of calling
“father” the grown-ups also was suggested by Plato in his Republic, a
book that looks like a carbon-copy of Sparta.
It is through the conquests, victories and defeats that the warrior

does know himself and the enemy—in the case of Sparta, his fellows. And
when a man knows himself, his neighbors and the enemy, wisdom of life
is accomplished. Thus he acquires security, prudence, intuition and high
confidence. Each Spartan knew his brother because surely he had fought
against him, or seen him fight, or had played with him in this rough
rugby, or otherwise had suffered together. His whole life was a civil war.
They fought against themselves and each other, which did not mean they
were no longer together: quite the opposite. This system was a useful
outlet for the anger of the race, which was elsewhere tragic in fratricidal
conflict, and Sparta almost harmlessly vented such aggression in
competitions.
All aspects of the Spartan child’s life were regulated to increase his
insensitivity to suffering and aggression. You will be put under a ruthless
discipline that requires you to learn to control pain, hunger, thirst, cold,
heat, fear, fatigue, disgust, discomfort and lack of sleep. You will be
taught survival skills in the field including tracking, guidance, hunting,
water extraction and knowledge of edible plants. This will reduce your
dependence on civilization and you will be put in touch with the tradition
of our hunter-gatherer ancestors of more primitive times.
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To achieve all this, the strict and unscrupulous instructors used any
means possible to their reach. Wear situations imposed on the young
were so intense that they would probably come to a state very close to
dementia, with the presence of hallucinations induced by lack of sleep
and food. The mastigophora (carriers of the whip) were charged to
brutally beat and even torture anyone who failed, complained or moaned
in pain, so that the tasks came up perfect.
Sometimes children were whipped for no reason, only to harden

them, and the Spartan boys would rather die than groan and ask why
they were whipped. Spartan philosophy coincided with Nietzsche’s when
they thought “Blessed is what hardens us!” There even were competitions
to see who could hold the most numerous and intense lashes without
shouting. This was known as diamastigosis.
Sometimes the priestess of Artemis ordered that, in her presence

and before an image of the goddess, some children chosen by her to be
whipped. If the ceremony-torture was not liked by the priestess she
ordered the whipping intensified. These children not only had the
obligation not to show pain, but to show joy. The macabre winner of the
competition was he who endured longer without complaint. It happened
that some died without groaning. It would be said that this is
sadomasochistic nonsense, but we cannot judge an ancient custom with
modern mentality.
Surely the event inculcated in the victims the notion of sacrifice for
the archetype of their homeland (Artemis) and taught them to master
suffering with that divinity in mind. Meanwhile, in the rest of Greece
athletes underwent voluntarily lashes sessions since it helped tighten
their skin and body, and purging the impurities. And Sparta was,
undeniably, an athletic state. (He who has been in countries where lashes
are still used as punishment will have noticed how much the unfortunate
victim transpires, leaving a huge puddle on the floor at the end of
execution.)
Nietzsche described the lack of pity towards the promising
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candidates: “I spare you not, I love you from my very heart, my brethren
in war!” And in words that seem aimed at an instructor, a manufacturer
of overmen, he says: “To thee one law—be pure and bright!” Compassion
was the worst poison for Sparta, because it preserved and prolonged the
life of all weak and dying—whether it was compassion towards
themselves, their peers or the enemies. In the Song of the Lord, the
monumental Indo-Iranian Bhagavad-Gita, it is written that “the truly
wise mourn neither for the living nor for the dead.”
To suffer and endure pain without complaining was part of the

Spartan idiosyncrasy. Boys were proud of the amount of pain they could
endure through clenched teeth, and remember that Nietzsche also said
that the degree of suffering to which a man is able to tolerate determines
his hierarchical place. It is perfectly understandable that this kind of
stoicism be interpreted as a masochistic cult of suffering, but we must
avoid falling into this error of interpretation. In Sparta the suffering was
a means to awaken the fighter’s instincts of a man and to liaise with his
body and with Earth itself. Suffering was not meekly accepted with the
head down: it was struggled to dominate it, and everything was intended
to achieve indifference to suffering—unlike the masochistic cults, as are
some variants of modern Christianity or the modern “humanitarian”
atheist which produces sentimental and tender beings even for the pain
of others.
Loyalty was a very important part of Spartan training. According to

Seneca, “Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart,” and according
to Goethe, it “is the effort of a noble soul to match a bigger soul than his.”
Loyalty conducted the children towards higher forms and served to make
them greater. Spartan boys were inculcated into unswerving loyalty to
themselves, their peers and their own Order—i.e. the Spartan state. “My
honor is called loyalty,” said the SS, and it could have also been a good
motto for the Spartans. For them, loyalty was an asceticism that led them
down the road of the right order, morality of honor (aidos and timé) and
compliance with the sacred duty.
As mentioned, obedience was also paramount in the instruction, but
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to what extent was such obedience fulfilled? The answer is: it had no
bounds. It was put to the test every day. A Spartan boy could be ordered
to kill a helot child or provoke a fight with a partner, and it was assumed
he would not ask questions but obey quietly and efficiently. He could be
given seemingly absurd or unworkable orders to test him, but the
important thing was that, without hesitation, he blindly and
unquestioned sought the obedience of such order. Obeying was sacred
and basic, because the higher knows something the subordinate does not
know. In the Army it is said, “He who obeys is never wrong.” Young
Spartans were constantly tested. If a Spartan boy were told to jump off a
cliff, he probably would not have hesitated and would throw himself
without blinking and furious conviction.
All this, to profane eyes, all of it may seem exaggerated and

outrageous, but the profane still does not understand what it means.
When the individual is sure to belong to “something,” of being directly in
the service of the divine, the orders are not questioned because they come
from Above, from somewhere they cannot understand—for now. Serving
a similar but higher individual is self-serving, because that control is the
community of which the individual is a part. When all the pieces of a gear
assume their role with conviction it gives a general sense of calm,
confidence, and order that allows men to perform the most dangerous
and heroic deeds naturally.
Adolf Hitler said: “the conviction that obeying the voice of duty
works for the conservation of the species helps the most serious
decisions.” If something unjust is ordered it was for the greater good, and
in any case questions were never asked. They were obeyed for the sake of
obedience, as part of a military-monastic discipline. Obeying an order
was obeying to oneself and to the clan, because the chief was an
embodiment of the will of the clan. Nietzsche himself advised: “So live
your life of obedience and of war!” This magic of loyalty, duty and
obedience is what leads the great men to the path of glory.
Instruction was outdoors. The Spartan boys were always immersed

in Nature: in nature’s sounds, vibrations, landscapes, animals, trees,
- 45 -
changes, cycles and nature’s will. They learned to join their homeland;
know it, love it and consider it a home. They were forced always to walk
barefoot and directly touch the earth: feeling it, understanding it,
connecting directly to it as trees. The masseuses know that the feet are
the “remote control” of the bodily organs. Having your feet directly in
contact with the earth is, undoubtedly, an important massaging effect on
the whole body—a destroyed effect today with soles and heels that
rumple the natural shape of the foot at work. And not only that: walking
bare feet hardened the feet as wood, and eventually the young Spartans
moved more lightly on the land than those who had softened their feet
with shoes, as feet are designed for that, and if presently this does not
work is because we did not develop them, nor tanned them as would be
natural.
In winter, Spartans children had to take baths in the icy river

Eurotas. They dressed alike in winter than in summer, and slept outdoors
on hard reeds torn by the river and cut by hand. The maneuvers and
marches they carried out were exhausting, and would kill almost any
man of our day—in fact some Spartan boys died of exhaustion. Gradually,
the bodies of the boys grew accustomed to cold and heat, developing
their own defense mechanisms. Gradually, they became increasingly
harder, stronger and more resistant.
As nutrition, they were deliberately assigned an insufficient ration,

which included the harsh and bitter Spartan black bread and the famous
Spartan melas zomos (black soup), which was downright inedible for any
non-Spartan. (The bitter black bread was also common in the German
military of World War II.) It is said it contained, among other things,
blood and pig entrails, salt and vinegar (think of the ingredients of the
sausage or black pudding). Probably the ingestion of such concoction was
itself a practice of self-control that helped to harden the mouth, stomach
and digestive tract. Spartan food, generally, was considered by other
Greeks as very strong, if not disgusting. (The development of very strong
“delicacies” whose mere ingestion shows courage and resistance is a
common military motif. Think of a concoction called “panther’s milk”
- 46 -
including condensed milk and gin, popular in the Spanish Legion who
sometimes even added gunpowder.)
Moreover, rough and scanty food rations moved the Spartan boys to
seek their own food by hunting and gathering or theft, which they
themselves cooked. If discovered in the act of stealing food they would
expect brutal beating or whipping and deprivation of food for several
days, and not for stealing the food which could be stolen from the helots
—but for having been caught. Somehow, this reminded the tradition of
“right of prey” of the ancient Indo-European hordes: ancient armies
usually lacked any campaigns of logistics and survived thanks to taking it
from Nature or by plundering their enemies and indigenous populations.
Sparta wanted to teach people to obtain food by their own and

getting them used to this; thus adapting them to a lifestyle of uncertainty
and deprivation. They lived in a perpetual state of war, and they wanted a
right mentalizing. Already Xenophon said, “A hunter, accustomed to
fatigue, makes a good soldier and a good citizen.” On the other hand,
Sparta greatly respected the animals and like the Dorians even retained
archaic cult divinities with animal parts (like the Apollo Karneios with
ram’s horns), which symbolizes the condensation of the totemic qualities
associated to the animal in question. Spartan boys who lived in the open
should have felt identified with many of the animals around them,
forging a certain complicity with them.
We know the story of the Spartan boy who, having captured a fox as
food, hid it under his cloak to hide from a group of approaching soldiers.
The fox, desperate, began using his teeth and claws to attack the child’s
body, but he endured it without shouting. When the blood flowed, the fox
became more aggressive and began to rip pieces of flesh of the child,
literally eating him alive. And the boy endured the pain without
screaming. When the fox had come to his gut, gnawing the organs, the
small Spartan fell dead and silent in a discrete pool of blood, without
leaving out a moan or even having shown signs of pain. It was not fear
that made him hide his hunting, for surely that slow and painful death
was worse than a lot of lashes. It was his honor, his discipline, the
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capacity for suffering, will, strength and toughness—qualities that in his

short life he had developed more than any adult in the present. This
macabre anecdote, related by Plutarch, is not intended as an apology
(after all, Sparta lost in this child an excellent soldier), but an example of
Spartan stoicism, which sometimes reached delirious extremes.
With measures of food shortages they wanted to encourage the body,

by being deprived from growth in the width, to have more strength and
stature. (This produced results, as Xenophon described Spartans as
higher than the other Greeks, although heredity also played an important
role in this.) They favored the emergence of higher, compact, robust,
flexible, slender, hard, agile, strong and athletic bodies; taking a
maximized advantage of it with a concentrated, trimmed and fibrous-to-
the-end muscles, not prone to injury and with great endurance to pain,
fatigue, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, disease, shock, tremendous efforts or
prolonged and terrible wounds.
Those were not bodies with overdeveloped muscles, requiring an

immense diet and constant and impractical maintenance. Bodies were
concentrated, whole and proportionate, designed to survive with the
minimum: perfect biological machines which could be studied at a glance
in every vein, every tendon, every ligament, every muscle and muscle
fiber at the skin’s surface. Their strength should have been awesome,
otherwise they would not have been able to live, march and fight with the
full force of weapons, armor, shield, etc. Plutarch said that the bodies of
the Spartans were “hard and dry.” Xenophon, on his part, stated that “it
is easy to see that these measures could only produce an outstanding race
and strength and building. It would be difficult to find a people more
healthy and efficient than the Spartans.”
This was the most appropriate body for the fighter. Plato in his
Republic, made clear that the careful diet and regimen of specific
exercises that the athletes practiced made them not to surrender when
suddenly they were deprived from their routines—during a military
campaign for example—, as their bodies were too used to have such
amount of nutrients and rely on them. In extreme situations, such bodies
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reacted instinctively by reducing muscle mass and producing exhaustion,

weakness and malaise. At the Battle of Stalingrad many German fighters
inexplicably dropped dead. It was later learned that it was a combination
of both hunger, cold and exhaustion. The most affected by this death
were precisely the burly and massive men, that is, those requiring more
maintenance in terms of food and rest.
Wrestlers of all ages were able to understand this, among them the
Roman legionaries who looked for hard, strong and concentrated bodies;
and the SS, who exercised without pause, eating a poor diet that included
the famous porridge oats: a porridge that so much influenced
physiologically the proverbial impassivity of both the English and the
Swedes. (We know that oats also influences the tranquility of racehorses,
and the athletic diets usually incorporate it.)
As shown by their lifestyle, the Spartans were certainly muscular,

but not overdone as far as volume is concerned. They were not massive
like the body-builder monsters of today, and to be sure of what we say it
is enough to see the nutritional deprivation they suffered, and the
exercise regimen they had, so abundant and intense in aerobic efforts.
Their level of definition and muscle tone, however, must have been
awesome.
Spartan boys were taught to observe, to listen, to learn, to be

discreet, not to ask questions and assimilate in silence. They were taught
that withdrawal or surrender in battle was a disgrace, that all combat
should end in victory or death and that, as Xenophon said, “A death with
honor is preferable to a life without honor.” Or in the words of Nietzsche,
“To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”
The Spartans, like the Celtic Druids and the perfect Cathars and
Templars were forbidden to do heavy manual work: their job was war.
However, when giving up manual labor they also renounced the fruits of
such work: They were imbued with austerity, simplicity and asceticism in
all aspects of his life, eliminating anything that might soften or weaken
them. Their gestures were measured, reduced, and righteous, and their
- 49 -
manners solemn and respectful. Their houses totally lacked any

decoration and had a rustic and rough look, of stone and wood. The aim
was to increase the lack of need for each Spartan, his personal self-
sufficiency.
In fact, they were not allowed the luxury of the language, so they
spoke the right words, dryly, directly, firmly and martially. A Spartan
child should remain silent in public, and if you spoke to him he had to
respond as soon as possible, with elegance and conciseness, military-
style. The Spartan language was like the Spartan village: scanty but of
high quality. It was a language of voice, command and obedience. It was
infinitely more unpleasant in sound, more mechanical, hard and rough
even than the legionnaire Latin or the most martial German. The rough
Dorian dialect spoken in Sparta, the “laconic,” has become synonymous
with dryness and simplicity of speech.
And simplicity of speech is essential for a higher spirituality. Lao

Tzu, the legendary messenger of Taoism, said “To speak little is natural.”
There are numerous and illustrative examples of Spartan brevity. This is
a good one: On one occasion in which a Spartan garrison was about to be
surrounded and attacked by surprise, the Spartan government simply
sent them the message: “Warning.” That was enough for men spending a
lifetime in military exercising. “To a good listener, few words” (are
enough) says Spanish proverb.
The Spartan laconic manners are the direct opposite to the vulgar
quackery of today when many opinionated, hysterical voices blend
miserably without harmony, destroying silence with nonsensical words: a
silence that would be infinitely preferable to that hustle. Speech is far
more important than what is accepted today. It condenses
communication between people, decisively influencing the way that the
individual perceives those around him, particularly his fellow-men. The
individual learns to know himself better through knowledge of their
fellows, and the concept he has of their peers will have an echo in his own
self-esteem. Nietzsche himself, a scholar of philology, attached great
importance to speech, dedicating lengthy paragraphs to it.
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To learn about politics, solemn manners, respect for the elders and
government affairs, Spartan children were taken to the Army guilds or
Syssitias (which I will describe later), where young and old men
philosophized, talked, and discussed about the affairs of the day.
Plutarch said that for the very young attendance at these circles was like a
“school of temperance” where they learned to behave like men and “trick”
an adversary. They were taught to make fun of others with style, and face
teasing. Should it be bad a joke, they should declare themselves offended
and the offender immediately ceased. The grown-ups tried to test
children to know them better and identify their strengths, and the
children should manage to make a good impression and look good during
those congregations of attentive veterans, responding with greater
ingenuity and promptly to the most twisted, malicious and gimmick
questions.
In the Syssitias children learned also the aristocratic and ironic

humor typical of the Spartans, learning to joke with elegance and
humorously. It is not strange at all that a people like the Spartans,
aristocratic, solemn and martial, accorded great importance to humor
and laughter—the Spartans had to be especially masters of black humor.
Although the helots probably found fascinating the seriousness of the
Spartans and would consider them repressed, the Spartans among
themselves were like brothers. On order by the very Lycurgus, a statue of
the god of laughter decorated the Syssitias. Laughter was indeed of great
therapeutic importance. We can imagine the joy, the emotions and
laughter that were heard in the sporting competitions, matches and
tournaments of Sparta, as in the hour of playing and competing the most
solemn and trained men become children.
Education, courtesy and manners were greatly appreciated in

Sparta. Why was this so important? Simply because when members of a
group follow exemplary behavior, respect prevails; and you want to do
well to maintain the honor and gain the respect of your comrades.
Further, when members of a group indulge in deplorable attitudes or
decadent diversions, respect diminishes, and the prestige within the
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group disappears. Why earning the respect of the unworthy through

sacrifice if they not even respect the spirit of excellence? The result is
plain to see when those renounce to act exemplarily: one is left to soak in
the degenerated atmosphere and imitates what he sees. The Spartans
sensed this, and established a strict code of conduct and solemn manner
at all times to start a virtuous circle.
Spartan instructors often caught the helots and forced them to get
drunk; dress ridiculously, dance grotesque dances and sing stupid songs
(they were not allowed to recite poems or sing songs of the “free men”).
Thus adorned they were presented to the children themselves as an
example of the damage caused by alcohol, and the undesirability of
drinking too much or drinking at all.
Let us imagine the psychological impact of a proud, hard tanned

Spartan boy contemplating an inferior ridiculously dressed, dancing
awkwardly and singing incoherently. All this staging served for the
Spartan boy to experience a good deal of disgust towards his enemies,
who were taught to despise. In Sparta there was no vice of alcoholism, as
a drunkard would had been fanatically pulp-beaten to the death as soon
as spotted. It was Lycurgus himself who had ordered to weed the
grapevines outside Sparta, and overall alcohol was something considered
with utmost caution, distrust and control.
The lifestyle of the Spartan children would kill in less than a day the
vast majority of adults of today. How did they endure? Simply because
they had been bred for it. From an early age they were taught to be tough
and strong, tanning in nature and neglecting the comforts of civilization.
And the children’s bodies and spirits learned quickly and adapted easily
to any situation, developing the qualities they needed to survive.
Moreover, they were not allowed contact with anything that might soften
them in the least, and so grew uncorrupted and uncontaminated.
As they grew, children discipline became tougher: puberty

approached. Such transit in a society as close to its tribal roots as the
Spartan must necessarily be accompanied by some kind of initiation
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ritual, probably in the brotherhoods to which they belonged. It is in

adolescence when young people are initiated in their own incipient
masculinity, and in Sparta they were prepared so that the advent of the
male forces did not catch their innocent instincts by surprise. So, on the
fly, and day to day, they were learning to become men without the chaotic
physiological and mental imbalances currently rigged at arrival of
adolescence.
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The education of adolescents
THE EDUCATION OF ADOLESCENTS

We know with certainty that, at the gates of puberty, there was a
brutal initiation ritual of physical and psychological type to be overcome
in order to continue with the instruction. During the festival of the
goddess Artemis, the altar was filled with tasty cheese. Aspiring lads had
to steal as many cheeses as they could, but this must outwit a phalanx of
armed lads with whips, instructed to use them unscrupulously in the task
of protecting the altar. To achieve their objective, the boys must learn to
coordinate and demonstrate a spirit of sacrifice and selflessness.
Everyone received terrible wounds, but it was necessary to endure the
pain as they stole the pieces. Sometimes a boy died. In Sparta there were
many tests of this type, whose goal was to bring applicants to the limit to
harden them up, also discarding the weak. Those who, covered in blood,
bore the “ceremony” with no moan, cry pain or scream were awarded
crowns of leaves and hailed as heroes for their people, acclaimed by their
elders, young girls and the younger siblings, who found the triumph
inspiring. Thus, the victorious became eirenes or irenes (ephebes).
From the moment following the festival of Artemis, a transformation

operated in the instruction of the boys who had passed the test. They
came from the gangs, receiving out a simple himation (woolen clothing)
each year, being forbidden the chiton (common tunic). Discipline became
stricter.
According to Xenophon, Lycurgus realized that, from adolescence,

self-will is rooted in the mind of the boy. It looms in his conduct a subtle
trend of insolence which marks the beginning of a selfish appetite and
individualistic pleasure. Also, the stage that separates the fearful and
innocent child from the wise veteran is a thin red line of imprudence and
recklessness, typical of adolescence and those who, having learned a lot
but not enough, tend to overestimate themselves and commit dangerous
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blunders. And that is the most difficult step in any learning: when you
think you know “enough.”
To counter this potential pride, Spartan ephebes had to walk

through the streets in silence, with their head bowed and their hands
hidden, without looking around but fixing their eyes on the ground,
taking a walk of monks, as centuries later would walk the perfect
Manichean. Boys who would otherwise be the loudest and annoying were
converted into gray and ghostly silhouettes. This, of course, was not
permanent but temporary and contributed to strengthen the humility
and modesty of the young Spartans; and to raise the pride of those who,
after concluding their instruction, were allowed to walk with their heads
held high. It also helped in the meantime that the citizens would not feel
offended by the presumption of the candidates, since there is nothing to
offend more a seasoned veteran than an arrogant and cocky “newbie” too
proud of his achievements.
But on the other hand, the ephebes were first taught to read and
write, and were taught music, dance, mythology and poetry. And, for the
first time since they were seven years old, long hair was permitted: in
which care they would rush, gradually getting spotless manes and feel
pride of them, since the hair was “the cheapest ornament” and, according
to Lycurgus, “adds beauty to a beautiful face, and terror to an ugly face.”
Wearing long hair was an ancient Greek custom that somehow recalled
the barbarian origins of the race. Many have given long hair, especially in
the case of women, the importance of signs of fertility: nervous system
extensions and tuners of spiritual capacities. Archetypically, it is the
manifestation of the spiritual bell that comes from the top head of the
consummate practitioner of inner alchemy. On the formation of long hair
act factors such as nutrition, health, exposure to sun and air, and
exercise. Thus the mane should be something like a banner of
individuality, a personal identification sign denoting the health and
habits of the individual.
What is clear is that for some young people who had been at age
seven with a shaved head, a grown hair should have represented a sign of
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psychological improvement, and convey the sense of a new, more

spiritual stage, less helpless and raw, less brutal. After the painful stage
in which children sacrificed their hair, they had conquered the beauty
and individuality allowed to their perfect ancestors. Both the shaved head
like the achievement of long hair were for the Spartans two stages of an
archetypal transformation process, internal and external.
The most important new material of this period was the music,
which was oriented to religious, patriotic and war hymns. The songs and
the singing together is something that helps the united cultivation of the
spirit and strengthen the cohesion of the collective unconscious. Each
alliance of warriors always has had its songs. In Sparta there were
numerous choirs, and every Spartan child should learn to sing in a
chorus. In many ceremonies three groups were organized: one of old
people, other of young males and another for children. When elders
began singing “In the past we were young and brave and strong,” the
young men continued “and so are we now, come and check it out for,”
and the kids responded “but soon we will be the stronger.” A nation that
prides itself always seeks that each generation is better than the previous
as time goes on, like a wolf pack: the younger vigorous and impulsive
generations replace the older in positions through direct action.
Great emphasis was placed in the cultivation of memory, and the

young Spartans memorized ballads of the poet Tyrtaeus, who had helped
them so much in the second Messenian war. As an example of the poetry
of Tyrtaeus, forgive the following snippet:
Let’s advance by locking a concave wall of shields, marching in

rows of Pamphyli, Hylleis, Dymanes [the three originating
Dorian tribes], and waving in the murderer hands the spears.
Thus entrusting us to the Eternal Gods, without delay we
comply with the orders of the captains, and we all right away
go to the rude fray, firmly raising in front of those spearmen.
Tremendous will be the crash when both armies collide their
round shields and resonate when abut each other… Well, it’s a
beautiful die if you fall into that vanguard like brave warrior
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who fights for his country… with courage fight for the
homeland and the children, and die without begrudging now
our lives…
Those who dare, in closed row, to fight melee and advance in

vanguard in fewer number die, and save those who follow
them. Those who are left with nothing tremble without honor…
Go in melee combat, with long spear or sword smite and finish
with the fierce enemy. Putting foot by foot, squeezing shield to
shield, plume with plume and helmet to helmet, chest to chest
fight against the other, handling the hilt of the sword or the
long spear… Go forward, children of the citizens of Sparta, the
city of the brave warriors! With the left hold firm your shield,
and the spear brandish boldly, without worrying to save your
life: that is not the custom of Sparta. Make the spirit of your
heart strong and courageous, and do not fall in love with life
when you are fighting men.
The Spartan ephebes assiduously studied Homer, whose many

verses could recite. But of course, the military-physical training did not
stop ever, and was always the main subject. As they were getting older
some boys were placed in front of the gangs of younger children, either as
paidonomos or mastigophora. The desire of the veteran to make the
rookie suffer to perfect him and cure him, teaching him everything he
had learned—and that occurs in any army—, was taken to squeeze the
new generations and to excel the foregoing.
We have seen that all instruction was intended to cultivate Spartan

abilities as will to power, decision-making, the pleasure of responsibility,
valor, courage, bravery, stoicism, patriotism, the martial, the ability of
leadership, sobriety, self-control, asceticism, austerity, sacrifice and
suffering, courage, physical and moral toughness, the sense of duty and
honor, fortitude, wisdom, psychological and spiritual balance; the quick
wit, sharp and cold and chivalry education, character building, solemnity,
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respect, brevity, iron discipline, efficiency, holy obedience and

aggression. A wide range of important and basic qualities, today
endangered. But all these qualities would be useless if they were not used
for something; if they had no objective, a single goal. Nietzsche wrote, “It
is inexcusable that, having power, you do not want to dominate.”
Any discipline, asceticism, self-control, the terrible pain, the fear, the
danger, the risk, rivalry, hunger, thirst, sleepiness, exhaustion, cold, heat,
discomfort, the hideous cruelty, the suffering and fighting, the beating,
whipping, insults, blood splashing everywhere, the constant
omnipresence of deeper death and higher life leading to a prodigious
tension of life, were a wonderful and magnificent expression of how a
whole lineage wanted to be: furious, and, at all costs, the absolute
masters of their own collective will enthroned on Earth and mercilessly
crushing any enemy that arose. Are these bad feelings? Or, conversely,
are they highest and most admirable sentiments, sacred impulses that
prompt to live, to fight, to destroy, to create, to renew and translate into
some eternal memory? These were qualities and feelings that Indo-
European humanity has lost and must be recovered.
All this is great as it is. Now then, what was the result of these
qualities and these feelings? What was the result of such education?
What was the result of the discipline of great suffering? The result was a
man of superior type, with a cool head and insensitive to pain, suffering
and discomfort, who used to think quickly in times of great danger and
stress. A soldier well versed in all the arts of war who used to fight to
achieve his goals; a martial man bred and trained to rule. A fearless and
fearsome man, that despised his own life for the sake of his people;
despised more the others, so he was hard and ruthless. A mighty stoic
man also despised all material trifles of worldly life, and his only
dedication were his brothers in combat, his loyalty to his country, and his
devotion to his family and wishes of divinity for his race.
A man accustomed to outdoor life, which forged an unbreakable

bond with his land, which was regarded as a sacred legacy, a
responsibility. A gymnast with impressive physical form, a true athlete. A
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warrior used to earn things by himself. Nothing done to him would break
him; he was able to endure the most terrible pains and deepest spiritual
tragedies as calmly as accepting the joys and triumphs. After having
demonstrated the ability to obey, he earned the right to command.
Think of how Spartan children suffered the pain, fear, stress and
exhaustion. What happened when they emerged from childhood? Into
what they turned when growing and becoming men? How would the
body of an adult Spartan look like? We can only imagine, but at his side
the young athletes of the Athenian sculptures may seem harmless angels.
The Spartan body was immediately distinguished for being very

willowy, slender, dark-skinned not for race but for exposure to the sun,
air, moisture; to dry, fresh and salt water, the skewers of vegetation, to
stinging insects, dust, land, rock, snow, rain, hail and, ultimately, all
kinds of weather. This would make the Spartan skin so stranded and
hard as wood. Second, the relief of his body would be highlighted. The
type of physical training had favored the development muscle mass
concentration, hardness, strength, extreme flexibility and the “purging”
of all grease and impurities. Thus, the Spartan would be fibrous and
bulky at once, and would look lean and sharp. Vascular fat and softness
would shine by their absence; blood vessels, ligaments, fibers, muscles,
nerves and tendons would stand almost grotesquely and ultimately,
everything would appear to be a rough, twisted, tense and compact mass
of roots, branches, wires, tubes, cutting, marking and stones with the
color of the wood.
In addition we can figure out that their body would be entirely

crossed by many scars. The marks of the lashes would be remarkable in
many areas of the skin, but especially in the back. Each Spartan should
be a differential map, with different types of signs of violence. Many
would lack teeth, have a broken nose and scars on the skull and face: a
legacy of melee combats and brutal ball games. The height of the Spartan,
what their contemporaries have told us (remember Xenophon, though he
lived in an already decadent stage of Sparta), must be high if we consider
the malnutrition undergoing in childhood and puberty. In Thebes
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skeletons have been discovered belonging to a Spartan garrison, of which

180 centimeters must be a normal height among them. Spartan’s hair
was long, usually blond. They were allowed to grow beards and took
pride in their care, because for them the beard was a symbol of a free and
accomplished man who chooses his life. Their faces with a hard look, a
strong expression highlighted by the intensely of the blue eyes
bequeathed by their Dorian ancestors.
The animals are remarkable for their hardness, their instinct, their
resistance to pain and hunger, bad weather, and for their ferocity. The
Spartans, thanks to the energy that only comes with experience,
motivation and a fanatical and methodical training, were able to beat
them. Through self-sacrifice and the risk posed by blindly lunging the
unknown and the extreme, they were able to answer the question of
where the limits of man lay, and what man is capable when a
supernatural will dwells within and take firm roots throughout his being.
We cannot even imagine how were the men of ancient times, for
their ferocity, determination and toughness. Well, of them all, the
Spartan was the hardest and well-made, the most perfected and stronger.
The instruction of the Spartans was brutal, but in one way or another,
instructors have always unconsciously intuited that that is the best way to
form good warriors.
On a much smaller scale, modern armies also employ brutality

toward the recruits. The insults, shouting, offences, humiliation, beatings
and hazing—modern initiations—help the novice to be ashamed of his
former self, to get rid of it, forget it and change it to a personality that is
coupled with that of his comrades: another piece of the puzzle that will
become his unit. Moreover, often they are not called by names, but by
nicknames (“war names”) or numbers. Exhaustive exercises,
inconvenience, discomfort, suffering, fear, stress, disgust, etc., serve to
sustain and promote the recruit and his humility and respect before what
excels him. Only when the applicant has delivered himself as a sacrifice,
voluntarily touching bottom in strenuous suffering, he may start from
scratch again in a new way, with a transformed personality purged of its
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blemishes and tempered in the fire and the hammer of an ideal; firm,
fanatic, sublime and sacred. Today only the vaguest trace of all this
stoicism has reached us.
Public punishments, extremely difficult testing, the victory of each

gang and good sports scores helped to reinforce the prestige of the
Spartan community. A community not only has prestige for those who do
not belong to it, but its members feel that same prestige internally. This
morality, this esprit de corps, increased the pride of belonging to such
community. The sacrifices that Sparta members underwent made
everyone feel pride and honor in their contemplation. Every time a lad
calmly endured a whipping session, every time another one beat a sport
record, each time that, with his face torn and bleeding hands, the
victorious fighter triumphed over himself and over probability, the will of
each member of the community was persuaded: “such acts demonstrate
the greatness of my community. I am proud to be with these men and
will continue perfecting to reach their height.” And pride and elitism
swelled as with fire. When called “equals” among each other, they felt
mutually proud. And when a weak fell from exhaustion during a march,
when another was punished for moaning in a fight or under the lashes,
when another fainted of pain, when another did not return from the
forest or mountain, when another died in a career or of hunger, the same
iron will read these happenings: “Such acts show that not everyone has
the honor of belonging to our community, but that it must be won. I want
to win this honor and I am on track. And I want the weak to surrender,
leave or be removed from our community for the sake of it.” That is, they
dismissed those who might besmirch the honor of the word “ equal,” and
such removal was a sacrifice that kept alive the flame of pride.
This group is to the amorphous collectivity what the pack is for the
flock.
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Adult life
ADULT LIFE
“To breed, to bleed, to lead.”
—The law of the English aristocracy of old.
At age twenty, after thirteen years of an atrocious training that

tanned their bodies for the rest of their lives, with scarred skin and
crossed backs for the whipping, young Spartans reached the critical point
in their lives. In case they did not successfully pass the final phase of
instruction they became perioeci or perioikoi. The others were destined
for a solemn ceremony in which the diverse military communities called
Syssitias (which could be defined as communal meals, guilds or Army
clubs), formed to recruit members among the recently promoted. The
Syssitias had from fifteen to twenty members. Some had more prestige
than others, and they tried to keep up their fame by recruiting the new
“promotion.” Evaluating a candidate took into account his reputation, his
toughness, his skill with weapons, his courage, his audacity, his presence,
his fitness and intelligence.
The candidate presented himself in the table of the Syssitia he

aspired to join. Syssitia members then deposited small pieces of bread in
an urn. The contents of the urn were inspected, and if only one of the
pieces had been deliberately flattened by one of the members, the
candidate was rejected. Often it was the case that the best young, the
most promising and famous, were disputed by several prestigious
Syssitias, while the less remarkable were incorporated into the less
demanding. In any case, it was rare that a young Spartan was denied
entry to any Syssitia. But in the unlikely event of being rejected by all, the
young man in question became hypomeion (inferior). An outcast who ate
alone because of being rejected even by the most mediocre Syssitias
implied that the candidate was undesirable for his comrades. He had the
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Adult life
option to clean his honor through courageous deeds, or to fall in battle.
Joining a Syssitia meant that the member happened to be accepted

by their peers as a Spartiate with all obligations, but would not acquire
full citizenship rights until age thirty. That is, after thirteen years of
training and after entering the Army, there were still ten years of
“probation” which coincided with the period of greatest biological
flourishing.
Note that the criterion of the age of majority at twenty, and that
other issues such as purity in matters of sex was shared by the Germans.
Julius Caesar said about them in Gallic Wars:
From childhood they devote themselves to fatigue and

hardships. Those who have remained chaste for the longest
time receive the greatest commendation among their people.
They think that, by doing this, growth is promoted… And to
have had knowledge [sex] of a woman before the twentieth
year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts. However,
there is some hypocrisy in them in body issues, since men and
women bath naked together in rivers and in their dresses so
much of the body remains naked.
What is said here is exactly valid also for the Spartans who, as Indo-
Europeans of tradition, drank from the same sources as the Germans.
From an early age there was suffering, stimuli, glory and camaraderie to
clear the path to manhood when it arrived, following aidos morale
(“modesty,” “decency”). And even when maturity had arrived sexual
abstinence was maintained until the young man was spiritually able to
take control of his instincts. The end of all the preparatory stages was to
accumulate energy and testosterone to grow; to complete without
interference the biological alchemy that takes place in the male body
during this stage.
In each Syssitia the member was required to provide food in the
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Adult life
form of barley, wine, cheese, flour, figs, quinces and other fruits. If the
member failed repeatedly to provide rations he was expelled from the
Syssitia and degraded to perioeci or hypomeion. It was easy to get
rations: they came from the parcel of land (kleros) that each soldier was
assigned, a plot of land that he almost never saw; worked by helots, and
managed by his wife. Throughout all the state Sparta had 10,000 parcels
of which about 6,000 were in the territories of conquered Messenia.
At age of twenty, therefore, after having entered these military

Syssitias, young soldiers were incorporated in the Spartan phalanx. They
would be part of it, if they survived, until their sixty years: gradually
ascending the ladder of command, merit and experience. They would
spend most of their lives committed to the Army, although their
operational period would be ten years, between twenty and thirty. From
thirty they were allowed to live at home with their wives and perform
public tasks to become citizens and enter the Assembly. Until then, they
lived in military barracks and made all their meals with their Syssitia
fellows. When they had free time they supervised the instruction of the
younger generation and tried to teach them useful things, encourage
them for the fights to discover the capabilities of each child, and maybe
even learn something from them occasionally. Other times they were
given to the company of their elders to learn from them something
useful, or to hear their stories and their reflections.
The Syssitias were very important institutions in Sparta, for when

the men were not waging war, they were training for warring better. And
if not, they socialized with their comrades in these “clubs.” Only as a
fourth place were family relationships ranked. The Syssitias were
presided over by a statue of the god of laughter, introduced by the same
Lycurgus. There the Spartan developed his humor and his sharp and
terse conversations. There, men of every age and condition mingled. It
was impossible, thus, the emergence of the “generation gap” since all
generations shared their experiences and concerns. There were no
distinctions of wealth, only of valor itself, and the experience was taken
into account when assessing a man. They were united by the fact of
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Adult life
having passed the instruction, having had similar hardships, and being
male Spartans. They were proud to be joining the phalanx alongside
those who had amply demonstrated their toughness, bravery and
righteousness. That was what made them brothers.
It was of immense importance that each Spartan contracted

marriage and had many children, and in fact they imposed fines and
penalties for late marriage and there was even a tax of bachelorhood. As
for celibacy, it was a clear crime in Sparta, and it was not even conceived.
They were occasions of groups of girls beating up wandering bachelor
men of already certain age. Other witnesses recounted how in winter
single males and females and even couples without children were
stripped naked and forced to march through the city center singing a
song about how fair it was their humiliation, because they had failed to
fulfill the law.
Being single at a certain age—around twenty-five—was a disgrace

comparable to cowardice in battle, since Spartan femininity was
completely healthy, pure and trained to provide exemplary wives and
proud mothers. These women were perfectly at the height of a Spartan.
Under the natural viewpoint prevailed in Sparta, it was a crime that
existing perfectly healthy girls a lad deprived the race of offspring.
Plutarch tells a revealing anecdote about it. A famous and respected
Spartan general called Dercyllidas came at a meeting and one of the
young Spartans refused to relinquish his seat, as he should, “because you
do not leave a child that would relinquish it [the seat] to me.” The young
man was not reprimanded or punished, because he was right.
High rates of birth were favored through incentives and awards to

large families, plus the releasing of communal pay of those who had more
than four healthy children. This, along with the practical obligation to
marry, was aimed at encouraging the multiplication of the race.
The same occurred in the Nazi SS, where we can see how they tried
by all means to multiply the progeny. Like the Spartans, the SS favored
the high birth rate among its members, punishing those who did not
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Adult life
reproduce. Some single officers were even threatened with expulsion,

and were given a year to get married. In other cases, when a fighter of the
SS had lost all his brothers, he was often allowed a leave period to ensure
a large family before returning to the front. The alleged reason was that
the State was interested that his blood would not be lost for the future.
This policy healed the previous genocide of countless chaste, good men in
medieval Europe: particularly the members of military-religious orders
such as the Templars. Both the Spartans and the SS were a sippenorden,
i.e., a racial order or religious-military order: racial clans who wanted to
be eternal on earth; materially eternalized through their children and
their descendants.
We gather, in any case, that the Spartan population growth should

not be as great as many imagine, because despite its abundant children
many died in eugenic selection and childrearing, and others during the
instruction or infectious diseases expected by natural selection.
With respect to the superfluous, the Spartan philosophy was: “If it is

not essential, it is a hindrance.” Everything that was not necessary for
survival was banished with disdain. The jewels, ornaments, extravagant
designs, garish colors and other burdens and distractions, were excised
from Sparta. The luxury and decor were nonexistent. To the Spartans it
was strictly forbidden to trade with gold or silver, and the possession of it
was severely punished, as well as the use as ornaments or jewelry.
The Spartan state itself refused to make coins of any kind. As tool for
exchange of goods (that is, money), iron bars were used (Laconia had
important iron mines). They were so big, ugly and heavy that few people
wanted to accumulate them, hide them, or possess them (we could add
also to count them, pet them and watch over them with curiosity as did
the greedy with the beautiful gold coins). Moreover, the bars were not
accepted outside of Sparta. Plutarch says, referring to the Spartan
“currency” that “no one could buy with it foreign effects, nor it entered
the trading ports, nor reached Laconia any wordy sophist, greeter or
swindler, or man of bad traffic of women or artificer of gold and silver”
(Life of Lycurgus, IX).
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Adult life
In short, it was not easy to fiddle with this money; nor deal, bribe,
steal, smuggle or enter into contracts with foreigners; nor could vices
appear such as gambling or prostitution. The greedy was exposed, as it
needed a barn to store his entire fortune. And if someone happened to
cut the handle bars and hide them, the manufacturers of these—when it
was red-hot—dipped in vinegar, which made it lose ductility and could
not be worked or molded.
I cannot resist noting that the use of iron as money in Sparta is

archetypal and symbolic. While other states abandoned themselves in the
gold, Sparta adopted the rough metal. While other, softer states often
aimed at recreating the golden age in its nostalgic narcosis, Sparta
adapted itself to the hard times of the Iron Age. Sparta, really, was a true
daughter of the Iron Age: a jewel among ferments of decomposition of
the autumn evening light. It was in Sparta where the understanding of a
type of superior wisdom was kept: not the golden and regressed and
senile wisdom, but the new wisdom of iron.
Thanks to all the measures of sobriety, coarseness and austerity,

Sparta escaped the cosmopolitan, false soothsayers, jewelers, merchants,
liars, drug dealers and other eastern specimens, who refused to go
through a state where there was virtually no money; the little that existed
was an unwanted burden to his owner, and its inhabitants were all proud,
xenophobic and incorruptible soldiers.
Plutarch said that for the Spartans “money lacked interest or

appreciation.” Both the contempt of material and fleeting pleasures like
money itself points to an ascetic, anti-materialist and anti-hedonistic
society. Nietzsche repeated, like other Eastern teachers: “Whoever has
little is in no danger that he will be owned. Praise that simple poverty!”
The Spartans were taught that civilization itself, with its luxuries,
comforts, riches, its effeminacy, lust and complacency, was a dilutional
factor: something countless times certificated by Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, who admired the ascendant and uncontaminated world of the
barbarians, of which the Spartans were the ultimate, more refined and
perfected expression. Sparta did not have to be contaminated by this
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Adult life
dangerous Eastern influence, first because it had the abundant labor of

the helots and because, for racial reasons, it did not allow immigration
and the slave trade. Sparta saw itself as the repository of ancient Greek,
and especially, Dorian customs and thus they also saw the other people of
Hellas—except Athens.
From age twenty-five Spartans were allowed to eat with their wives,
occasionally. From age thirty (the age at which the growth hormone
decays) Spartan discipline relaxed, especially on the “communal” aspects.
The Spartan left, then, the military barracks and went to live in his home
with his wife and children (though by now probably some of his sons
would be suffering under state supervision and instruction). They joined
the Assembly, a popular organism to be discussed later, performing any
duty of the state, a responsibility assigned to him: like army
commanders, harmost (military governors) among the perioeci, envoys
from Sparta abroad, etc. They passed, then, to be citizens with all the
rights and all the duties.
At sixty years old, if he came to that age and if he had the honor of
being selected, the Spartan became part of the Senate. Being senator was
for life. Spartan old age enjoyed immeasurable respect from the
countrymen, who unconditionally revered their elders as repositories of
wisdom and experience, and as a link connecting the past with the
present, just as the youth is the bond that unites the present with the
future. The Spartans revered the elders even if they were not Spartans. As
an example of the latter we have a story that happened in the theater of
Athens while some Spartan ambassadors were inside. An old man
entered the theater and no Athenian rose to cede the seat, acting as if
they didn’t know. However, upon arrival at their place of honor all the
Spartan ambassadors rose in unison to cede the place. And then the
Athenian audience applauded the noble gesture. “All Greeks know good
manners,” said one of the ambassadors, “but only the Spartans behave in
accordance with them” (Life of Lycurgus, IX).
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Women and marriage
WOMEN AND
MARRIAGE
“Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation
of the warrior: all else is folly.”
—Nietzsche
So far we have examined in detail the Spartan man. It is time to

consider the woman and to direct our attention towards her. The
Spartans were perhaps the clearest representation of women of honor in
the Iron Age, raised under a system that brought out their best qualities.
But is it a paradox that, under a resounding patriarchy, women might
enjoy broad freedoms? Is it nonsense that in a military where women
should have nothing to do, they had more rights than women in any
other Greek state? The German ideologue Alfred Rosenberg wrote:
Sparta offered the example of a well disciplined state, and was

devoid of any female influence. The kings and the ephors
formed the absolute power, the essence of which was the
maintenance and expansion of this power through the increase
of the Dorian upper stratum with its disciplined outlook.
The Indo-Europeans were strongly patriarchal nations, whose most

representative word was precisely “fatherland,” in Latin patria (father).
In Germanic languages—German Vaterland and fatherland in English—
the words mean “land of the fathers.” Sparta itself was patriarchal to the
core, but as we shall see, the Spartans were not in any way unfair or
oppressive to their wives. They enjoyed an impossible freedom in the
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effeminate societies where everything is focused on materialism and

enjoyment of earthly, temporary pleasures, when the woman becomes an
hetaerae: a passive object of enjoyment and distorted worship.
Sparta, a state so hard and so manly, was the fairest of Hellas in

everything concerning their women, and not for mollycoddling, spoiling
or flattering them. Sparta was the only Greek state which instituted a
policy of female education, outside the knowledge of the home and
children that every woman should own. Sparta was also the state with the
highest literacy rate of all Hellas, because Spartan girls were taught to
read like their brothers, unlike the rest of Greece where women were
illiterate.
In the rest of Greece, sometimes, newborn girls (remember the myth

of Atalanta), even if they were perfectly healthy (just like in China today)
were exposed to death. Many parents almost considered a disgrace the
birth of a girl, and finally all that was achieved was to produce an
imbalance in the demographic distribution of the sexes.
But Sparta had more women than men, because their exposure of
girls was not as severe; because girls did not pass the brutalities of male
instruction, because they did not fall in battle, and because men were
often on campaign. Spartans who felt at home should, therefore, always
thought in terms of mothers, sisters, wives and daughters: the
Homeland, the sacred ideal, had a female character; and protecting it
amounted to protect their women. Men did not protect themselves: they
were the remote shell of the heart, the sacred heart, and sacrificed
themselves in honor of that heart. In Sparta more than anywhere else,
females made up the inner circle, while males represented the protective
outer wall.
Spartan girls received food in the same amount and quality of their
brothers, which did not happen in the democratic states of Greece, where
the best food pieces were for boys. Spartan girls were placed under an
education system similar to the boys that favored their skills of strength,
health, agility and toughness in outdoor classes, but trained by women.
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And they were not educated in that blind fanaticism inculcated to excel,
sacrifice and desire—that feeling that among boys brushed the desire for
self-destruction. For girls, on the other hand, the emphasis was put in the
domain and control of emotions and feelings and the cultivation of the
maternal instinct. It favored that youths of both sexes trained athletically
together, as it was expected that the lads would encourage the fair sex to
excel in physical exertion.
The hardness, severity and discipline of female education were, in

any case, much lower than those of the Agoge, and there was much less
emphasis on the domain of the suffering and pain as well as aggression.
Punishment for Spartan girls was not even remotely as cruel as the
punishment for boys, nor were torn out from their family homes at seven.
After seeing the almost supernatural prowess that meant male
instruction, the education of girls, despite being exemplary, is not
impressive.
But why was all this about, apart from the fact that all men were
active in the military and therefore needed more self-control and
discipline? Simply put, the man is a ticking time bomb. In his insides it
ferments and burns all kinds of energies and essences that, if not
channeled, are negative when poured out as these forces come from the
“dark side” which first inclination is chaos and destruction. The
aggressiveness of man, his instinct to kill, his tendency to subdue others,
his sexual boost, greatest strength, courage, power, will, strength and
toughness, make that he has to be subjected to a special discipline that
cultivates and channels those energies in order to achieve great things,
especially when it comes to young healthy men with powerful, natural
instincts—under penalty of which his spirits suffer a huge risk.
Asceticism itself (as sacrifice) is much more typical of man than

woman. In fact, the Indo-European woman was never subjected to
disciplinary systems as severe as those of the ancient armies. She was
considered by the men of old as a more “magical” creature because she
was not hindered by the roars of the beast within. For all these reasons, it
was fair that the male education was more severe and rigorous than the
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female: that is how you train the beast. “It is better to educate men,”
Nietzsche put in the words of a wise man who suggested disciplining
women.
The main thing in the female formation was physical and a

“socialist” education to devote their lives to their country—like men, only
that in their case the duty was not shedding her blood on the battlefield,
but to keep alive the home, providing a strong and healthy offspring to
her race, and raise them with wisdom and care. Giving birth is the fruit of
the female instinct that renews the race: that was the mission inculcated
in the girls of Sparta.
Spartan women ran, boxed and wrestled in addition of using javelin

and disc. They swam, did gymnastics and danced. Although they did
participate in sport tournaments, women were barred from the Olympics
because of the rejection of the other Hellenic peoples, infected with the
mentality whereby a “lady” should rot within four walls. We see that,
while Greek sculptures represent well the ideal of male beauty (think of
the Discobolus by Myron), they did not in the least approach the ideal of
Aryan female beauty: all women in female statues represented
amorphous, not very natural, non-athletic bodies albeit with perfect
facial features. If the Spartans had left sculptures of women, they would
have represented better the ideal of beauty because they, unlike the other
Greeks, had a clearly defined feminine ideal: it was clear what a woman
had to be.
As for female austerity, it was pronounced (though not as much as

the one that men practiced), especially compared with the behavior of the
other Greek women, so fond of the colors, superficiality, decorations,
objects, and with a hint of “consumerism” typical of civilized societies.
Spartan women did not even know the extravagant hairstyles from the
East and they wore, as a sign of their discipline, their hair up with
simplicity: probably the most practical for a life of intense sports and
activity. Also, all kinds of makeup, decorations, jewelry and perfumes
were unknown and unnecessary for Spartan women, which proudly
banished all that southern paraphernalia. Seneca said that “virtue does
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not need ornaments; it has in itself its highest ornaments.”
One purpose of raising healthy and agile women was that Spartan
babies, growing within solid bodies, were born as promising products.
According to Plutarch, Lycurgus “made the maidens exercise their bodies
in running, wrestling, casting the discus, and hurling the javelin, in order
that the fruit of their wombs might have vigorous root in vigorous bodies
and come to better maturity, and that they themselves might come with
vigour to the fullness of their times, and struggle successfully and easily
with the pangs of child-birth” (Life of Lycurgus, XIV).
Spartan women were prepared, since childhood, to childbirth and to

the stage where they would be mothers, teaching them the right way to
raise the little one to become a true Spartan. During this training, the
Spartan women were often babysitters, acquiring experience for times
when they would receive the initiation of motherhood. They married
from age twenty, and did not marry men who surpassed them greatly in
age (as in the rest of Greece), but with men their age or five years older or
younger at most. Age difference within the members of a marriage was
poorly viewed, as it sabotaged the duration of the couple’s fertile phase.
The aberration of marrying girls of fifteen with men of thirty was not
even remotely allowed, an aberration that did happen in other Hellenic
states where parents came to force unions whose age difference was of a
generation.
Nor was allowed in Sparta another abomination, which consisted of

marring girls with their own uncles or cousins to keep inherited wealth
within the family: an altogether oriental, anti-Indo-European and
unnatural mentality. Other practices, such as prostitution or rape, were
not even conceived. Or adultery. One Geradas, a Spartan of very ancient
type, who, on being asked by a stranger what the punishment for
adulterers was among them, answered: “Stranger, there is no adulterer
among us.” “Suppose, then,” replied the stranger, “there should be one.”
“A bull,” said Geradas, “would be his forfeit, a bull so large that it could
stretch over Mount Taygetus and drink from the river Eurotas.” Then the
stranger was astonished and said: “But how could there be a bull so
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large?” To which Geradas replied, with a smile: “But how could there be
an adulterer in Sparta?”
Such, then, are the accounts we find of their marriages.
In other Greek states, male nudity was common in religious and

sport activities, and this was a sign of their arrogance and pride. Female
nudity, however, was banned as the very presence of women in such acts.
But in the processions, religious ceremonies, parties and sport activities
of Sparta, girls were as naked as the young. Every year during the
Gymnopaedia, which lasted ten days, the Spartan youth of both sexes
competed in sports tournaments and danced naked. (This was another
suggestion of Plato in his Republic as well as one of the observations
made by Caesar on the Germans.) It was felt that, attending sporting
events, the young Spartan would be able to select a well-built husband.
Today nudist activities of this type would be ridiculous because

people’s nudity is shameful; modern bodies are flabby and lack normal
forms. The modern individual tends to see an athletic body as an
outstanding body, when an athletic body is a normal and natural body; it
is the rest, non-exercised types which are not normal. Recall Nietzsche’s
reflection: “A naked man is generally regarded as a shameful spectacle.”
However, at that time, witnessing such a display of health, agility,
strength, beauty, muscle and good constitutions should inspire genuine
respect and pride of race. The Hellenes of the democratic states argued at
the time that the presence of female nudity could cause leering looks, but
the fact is that the Spartans took it all with ease and pagan nonchalance.
Moreover, young Spartan women that identified an awestruck voyeur
used a clever string of jokes that made him a fool in front of the entire
stadium, full of solemn authorities and attentive people.
In some ceremonies, the girls sang about boys who had done great
deeds, or dishonored that had led to bad. They were, in some way, the
demanding voice of the Spartan collective unconscious, which ensures
the courage and conduct of men. Not only in the songs appeared the
pouring of their opinions, but in public life: they did not overlook a single
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one; they were not gentle, but were always criticizing or praising the
brave and coward. For men of honor, opinions on the value and
manhood were more important if they came from female voices worthy of
respect: the criticisms were sharper and praises more restorative.
According to Plutarch, the Spartan woman “engendered in young people
a laudable ambition and emulation.” That is why relationships with
women not softened them, but hardened them even more, as they
preferred to be brave and conquer their worship.
And what was the result of the patriarchal education on the young
girls? It was a caste of women on the verge of perfection: severe, discreet
and proud. Spartan femininity took the appearance of young athletic,
happy and free, yet serious and somber. They were, as the Valkyries,
perfect companion of the warriors. Trophy-women insofar as they
aspired for the best man, but physically active and bold; very far, then,
from the ideal of “woman-object.”
In all Hellas, Spartan women were known for their great beauty and
respected for their serenity and maturity. The poet Alcman of Sparta (7th
century BCE) dedicated a poem to a woman champion competing in
chariot races, praising her for her “golden hair and silver face.” Two
centuries later, another poet, Bacchylides, wrote about the “blonde
Lacedaemonian,” describing her “golden hair.” Given that the dyes in
Sparta were banned, we can deduce that racism and the Apartheid
instinct of the Spartans with respect to aboriginal Greeks was strong
enough so that, no more and no less than seven centuries after the
Dorian invasion, blond hair still predominated among the citizenry of the
country.
In a comedy called Lysistrata, written by the Athenian playwright

Aristophanes (444-385 BCE), there is a scene where a crowd of admiring
Athenian women surround a young Spartan named Lampito. “What a
splendid creature!” they said. “What a skin, so healthy, what a body, so
firm!” Another added: “I’ve never a chest like that.” Homer called Sparta
Kalligynaika, meaning “land of beautiful women.” On the other hand, do
not forget that the legendary Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in
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the world, was originally Helen of Sparta: an ideal that was stolen by the
East and that not only Sparta, but the whole Greece recovered through
fighting and conquest.[1]
Spartan women were superior in all respects to the other women of

their time and, of course, today’s women. Even in physical virtues,
courage and toughness they would outstrip most modern men. Their
severity was the best company to their husbands and the best raising for
their children, and she demanded the greatest sacrifices. An anecdote
recounts how a Spartan mother killed his own son when she saw he was
the sole survivor of the battle and that returned home with a back injury,
that is, he had fled rather than fulfill his sacred duty: immolation.
Another Spartan mother, seeing her son fled the combat, lifted her robe
and asked in the most merciless crudeness if his intention was to,
terrified, return from where he came. While other mothers would have
said “poor thing!” and stretched their arms open, Spartan mothers did
not forgive.
[1] The very image of Helen of Sparta has to be purified. Far from the common
vision that Hollywood has shown us, her spirit became disordered by the outburst
of Aphrodite. Helen, the highest ideal of Hellenic beauty and femininity, was
kidnapped by the East, hence the remarkable swat of the Greeks. Upon her arrival
in Troy, Helen recovered memory, recalled she was the queen of Sparta, was
married to King Menelaus, and they had two daughters; and bitterly regretted and
wept for her mistake.
Helen cursed her luck and Aphrodite by her deception, she considered herself
captive despite being treated like a princess, and despised her “husband” Paris (as is
evident when she contemptuously rejects him after having behaved like a coward
before Menelaus, for whom she reserved her admiration). Lamenting her fate, she
wished to be recovered by her lawful husband, as attested by the scene where she
has her window in form of open arms as to communicate the permanence of her
love. Once she was recovered for Greece, Helen returned to the Spartan throne with
honors, serving as queen again, as seen in the Odyssey when Telemachus, son of
Odysseus, goes to Sparta to inquire about the fate of his father. It is then that
Penelope, wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus, laments that her son goes to
Sparta, “the land of beautiful women.”
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Tacitus wrote that the mothers and wives of the Germans (whose
mentality was not too different from the Spartan) used to count the scars
of their warriors, and that they even required them to return with
wounds to show their readiness of sacrifice for them. The Spartans
believed that in their wives lived a divine gift, and it was not to be the
women who would convince them otherwise, so these women sought to
maintain the high standard of the devotion their men professed.
Furthermore, women were convinced that in their men lived the

nobility, courage, honesty, power and righteousness typically of the male,
along with the notion of duty, honor and the willingness to sacrifice; and
men also sought to keep up with such an ideal. Again, we find that the
ancient woman did not soften the man, but helped to improve and
perfect him because the man felt the need to maintain the integrity
before such women; so women remained alert and they did the same
with them, having in their minds that they themselves were ideals for
which their men were willing to sacrifice themselves. Thus, a virtuous
circle was created. The woman was a motif not to give up the fight, but
precisely a reason to fight with even more fanaticism.
Other Greeks were outraged because the Spartan women were not
afraid to speak in public; because they had opinions and, what is more,
their husbands listened. (The same indignation the Romans experienced
about the greater freedom of Germanic women.) Moreover, since their
men were in constant military camp life, Spartan women, like the
Vikings, were responsible for the farm and home. They managed the
home resources, economy and self-sufficiency of the family, so that the
Spartans relied on their wives to provide the stipulated food rations for
their Syssitias. Spartan women (again, like Germanic women) could
inherit property and pass it, unlike the other Greek women. All this
female domestic administration was, as we see, similar in Germanic law,
where women boasted the home-key as a sign of sovereignty over the
holy and impregnable family house, and of faithfulness to the
breadwinner. Home is the smallest temple that may have the smallest
unit of blood, the cell on which the whole race is based: the family. And
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the bearer of the key had to be forcibly the mother.
A society at war is doomed if the home, if the female rear, is not with
the male vanguard. All the sacrifices of the warriors are just a glorious
waste, aimless and meaningless if in the country no women are willing to
keep the home running, providing support and spiritual encouragement
to the men in the field and, ultimately, giving birth to new warriors. A
soldier far from home, without country, ideal and a feminine image of
reference—a model of perfection, an axis of divinity—immediately
degenerates into a villain without honor. Conversely, if he is able to
internalize an inner mystique and a feminine symbolism that balances
the brutality he witness day after day, his spirit will be strengthened and
his character ennoble. Sparta had no problems in this regard; Spartan
women were the perfect counterpart of a good warrior.
Even marriage was tinged with violence. During the ceremony, the
man, armed and naked, grabbed her arm firmly and brought the girl “by
force” as she lowered her head. (According to Nietzsche, “The distinctive
character of a man is will; and in a woman, submission.” In Spartan
marriage this was truer than anywhere else.) This should not be
interpreted in a literal sense of rapture, but in a metaphorical sense and
ritual: a staging of Indo-European mythologies are numerous with
references of robbery, kidnapping—and the subsequent liberation—of
something holy that is necessary to win, earn the right to own it. The fire
from the gods, the golden fleece, the apples of the Hesperides, the grail of
Celtic and Germanic traditions and the sleeping Valkyrie are examples of
such sacred images. Cherished ideals not to be delivered free but
conquered by force and courage after overcoming difficult obstacles, and
thus ensured that only the most courageous were able to snatch it and
own it, while the weak and timid were disqualified in the fight.
On the other hand, can we not find a similarity between the Spartan
marriage ritual and the Indo-Iranian sveyamvara marriage by abduction
allowed to warriors, and in the case of the Sabine abducted by Latins in
the origins of Rome, and the same type of marriage allowed to the old
Cossacks? In the Indo-Aryan writing, the Mahabharata, we read how the
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hero Arjuna abducted Subhadra “as do the warriors,” marrying her.

Again, it was not a literal rapture but rather the conquest of the sacred
through respect and strength what rendered the sacred fall before the
hero.
In Spartan marriage, then, we see how the Spartan woman was

elevated to the status of a divine ideal and not given by her parents to a
man chosen by them (as in other rituals of marriage, which makes the
bride an object of barter), but the brave man had to earn her. In fact, in
Sparta it was not allowed that parents had anything to do with the
marital affairs of their offspring; it was the couple that decided their
marriage, allowing that preferences and the healthy instincts of the
youths would be unhindered—making it clear that to possess a woman of
the category of the Spartan it was not enough wealth, parental consent,
marriage arrangements, dialectics, seduction or false words. It was
necessary to make an overwhelming impression; be robust and noble and
genetically worthy.
Also, the Spartan marriage ceremony—dark and almost sinister in its

direct crudeness—is the height of the patriarchal warrior society, and one
of the most eloquent expressions of patriarchy that governed in Sparta.
Lycurgus sought to establish military paranoia and a perpetual
environment of war even in marriage. Just as children had to procure
their food by hunting and gathering and rapine and pretending to be in
the enemy zone, an adult man should also win his chosen one by
pretending to be into fringe, hostile territory—“abducting her” in
remembrance of a hard and dangerous time that was not kind for
romance and lovers. This again made evident how little parents were
involved in a plot like this: in ancient times, if they refused to consent to
the marriage, the young man performed a daring raid and, with the
complicity of his fiancée, “abducted her.”
With the Spartan marriage system it was also subtly implied that, as
Nature teaches, not everyone was entitled to a female. To be eligible for
this right it was necessary for a man to pass a test: eugenics, child
rearing, education, entry into the Army Syssitias and the mutual fidelity
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of a young female belonging to the same call-up year, which in turn he

gained through observation and knowledge at sporting events, popular
and religious, and a long loving friendship whose latent purpose should
remain hidden from the rest of society. Throughout all these phases the
man conquered his beloved girl. The unconquered woman had to prove
nothing. She chose her fiancé and had the say as to accept her future
husband. Ultimately, it was she who willingly indulged in complicity,
leaving herself to be ritually “kidnapped” by the man of her choice.
After the ritual, the bride was taken to the house of her in-laws.
There they shaved her head and made her wore clothing like a man. Then
she was left in a dark room, waiting for the arrival of the groom. All this
is extremely difficult to understand for a modern Western mind and it is
not from this point of view we should try to understand it, but putting us
at the time and bearing in mind that both Spartan man and woman
belonged to an Order.
This last—totally sordid—phase served to impress upon the

newlyweds the notion that the secrecy and discretion of their relationship
was not over, and that they had not yet earned the right to enjoy a normal
marriage. For the woman it implied initiation, sacrifice and a new stage.
She was stripped from her seduction skills and her awareness of being
attractive. For the man, it was beneficial to make him appreciate what
really mattered of his wife: not clothes, hair or ornaments but her body;
her face and character.
Consuming an act in these gloomy conditions and absolutely hostile

to romance and sexual arousal was for both the man and the woman the
least imaginable stimulating, so that gradually they became accustomed
to the physical sensations arising from the sexual act, but without the
additional psychological stimuli such as a more feminine look in the
woman and a gentler environment—stimuli that tend to boycott male
stamina, moving him to abandon himself to pleasure and rest on his
laurels. Therefore, this staging was not much inspiring sexually in short
term, but instead was very stimulating in long-term in a subtle way:
slowly, it was blown into the hearts of the lovers the longing for that
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which was not still allowed.
So, by the time a woman had re-grown abundant hair, and the
pseudo-clandestineness of the relationship was dissipated over time,
both male and female were well experienced adults who knew what they
wanted and, despite it, had not suffered any loss in sexual desire but
rather were more than ever prepared to appreciate and enjoy what meant
a free physical relationship.
Lycurgus established that a man should be ashamed to be seen with

his wife in loving attitudes so that the meeting took place in private and
with greater intimacy and passion, and that the surrounding secrecy and
hostility favored the magic of the union: the feeling of complicity and the
true romance, which always has to have some secrets. (Plato said that
holding hands and fondling should be the maximum carnal love shown in
public.) The objective of this measure, too, was to promote mutual thirst
for true knowledge, fascination, mystery, magic: the sacred short-circuit
between man and woman, and—let’s say it—the curiosity of the
forbidden, so that their relationship had no public at all, but a private
matter, and to encourage that a man and a woman would not get tired of
one another. The Spartan couple should have, then, a powerful sexuality
that oozed from healthy bodies and pure spirits, resulting in a clean
eroticism and a positive lust necessary for the preservation of the race. In
the words of Xenophon:
He [Lycurgus] noticed, too, that, during the time immediately

succeeding marriage, it was usual elsewhere for the husband
to have unlimited intercourse with his wife. The rule that he
adopted was the opposite of this: for he laid it down that the
husband should be ashamed to be seen entering his wife’s room
or leaving it. With this restriction on intercourse the desire of
the one for the other must necessarily be increased, and their
offspring was bound to be more vigorous than if they were
surfeited with one another [Constitution of the
Lacedaemonians, 1].
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How, then, did the Spartans manage to be with their wives? In the
Syssitias, a man stood quietly and left the room, ensuring that nobody
saw him (at night it was forbidden to walk with a lighting of any kind, to
promote the ability to move in the dark without fear and safely). He
entered his home, where he found his wife and where happened what had
to happen. The man then returned to the Syssitia with his comrades in
arms, wrapped in a secrecy that almost touched the squalor. Nobody
noticed anything. The sexuality of the couple was strictly private, even
furtive and pseudo-clandestine so that no person would interfere with it
and make the relationship stronger and, to quote again Plutarch, that
their minds were always “recent in love, to leave in both the flame of
desire and complacency.”
Were Spartan relations normal, natural or desirable? No. Quite the

opposite. They created a most unpleasant weather, far from
corresponding to some sort of “ideal.” No sane person would want such a
relationship as a way of seeking pleasure. For the Spartans, however, as a
result of their peculiar idiosyncrasies, it “worked.” And yet, we see that
boredom, repetition, lack of curiosity and monotony, the real demons in
modern couples (and not an infrequent cause of dissatisfaction,
infidelity, breakups or perversions that emerge when breaking the
routine) were uncommon in Spartan marriages.
Spartan privacy and discretion were, in fact, the opposite of the

relations of our days: pure appearance and social desirability with a
public, not private basis. Spartans understood this important issue and
lived in conformity with it. They favored the meeting of men and women
in popular events, but they kept loving relationships strictly private.
(Millennia later, the SS also understood it, and on their tables of values
they firmly stamped: “Maintain the mysterious appearance of love!”) The
strength of their love came from themselves, unlike the infantile current
relationships whose fuel is the external world outside the couple, without
which the couple is empty and cannot function.
Spartan Romanticism was the epitome of love in the Iron Age: love
in a hostile area and in difficult times. Marriage relationships were
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designed for the exchange to be beneficial. Today, the marriage almost

invariably castrates man, making him fat, cowardly, lazy, and turning the
woman into a manipulative, hedonistic, whimsical and poisonous
individual.
On the other hand, there was another controversial Spartan measure

that had to do with the need to procreate. If a man began to grow old and
knew a young man whose qualities admired, he could present him to his
wife to beget robust offspring. The woman could cohabit with another
man who accepted her, if he was of greater genetic value than her
husband (i.e., if he was a better man). This was not considered adultery
but a service to the race. Also, if a woman was barren or began to decline
biologically, the husband was entitled to take a fertile woman who loved
him, and he was not considered an adulterer. In Viking society (the kind
of society that came from the ancient Dorians) if a woman was unfaithful
with a man manifestly better than her husband, it was not considered
adultery.
The above may seem sordid and primitive; it may seem an

annulment of the individual or of the order, and “reduce a man to the
status of cattle,” but with the strong desire of offspring in Sparta they
cared little about selfish or individual desires. To the forces of Nature and
race personal whims are unimportant; what matters is that the offspring
are healthy and robust, and that the torrent of children is never
extinguished. These peculiar measures, that in an undisciplined people
would have provoked chaos, in the Spartans, used to discretion and
order, did not cause any problems. On the other hand, we must avoid
falling into the trap of thinking that all couples “got laid.” In the majority
of cases both partners were healthy and fertile and did not need of any
“assistance.”
What was considered the birth in Sparta in the context of this

natural mindset? A good way to explain it is quoting an Italian Fascist
slogan, “War is to the male what childbearing is to the female.” The duty
of man was sacrificing his strength from day to day and shed his blood on
the battlefield, and women’s to struggle to give birth and raise healthy
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children. Since their childhood that was the sacred duty they had been
taught.
In this environment, a Spartan woman who refused to give birth

would have been as unpopular as a Spartan man who refused to fight, for
the woman who refuses to give birth sabotaged the sacrifice of the young
warrior just as the man who refuses to defend home sabotaged the efforts
of the young mother who gives birth. It would have been more than a
sacrilege: a betrayal. Artemis, the most revered female deity in Sparta,
was, among other things, the goddess of childbirth, and was invoked
when the young women were giving birth. In any case, labor for Spartan
women should not have been traumatic, first because since their
childhood their bodies were hardened and they exercised the muscles
that would help them give birth; secondly because they conceived their
children while they were still young and strong, and thirdly because they
gave birth under a happy and proud motivation of duty, aided by a
knowledge and a natural medicine confirmed by many generations of
mothers and Spartan nurses.
The great freedom of women in Sparta did not imply that women
were handed over leadership or positions of power. The woman was not
the driving, but the inspiring, generating and conservative force. She did
not dominate but subtly influenced, strangely reaffirming the character
of men. A woman could be a priestess or a queen, but not meddled in the
affairs of political and warrior leadership, because that meant taking a
role associated with the masculine side. The woman was a pure ideal that
must at all costs be kept away from the dirty side of politics and war
command, but always present in society and in the thought of the
warrior, because that was where resided her mysterious power. It was in
the mind of men where the woman became a conductive force, meaning
memory-love (in terms of Minni) and inspiration.
To Gorgo, queen of Sparta, wife of king Leonidas, a foreign woman

once said that only Spartan women kept any real influence over men, and
the queen answered, “because we are the only ones who give birth to real
men.” Again, they had influence over men, but not power. In ancient
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Women and marriage
Scandinavian meetings, as an example of the value of the feminine

influence, only married men were allowed to vote. The man was the one
who made the decisions, but it was assumed that he was not complete
until he had at his side a complementary, feminine spirit, a Woman who
could transmit certain magic everyday, and inspired him with her
reflections and only then he was allowed to vote. In practice, every
marriage was a single vote. On the other hand, in the other Hellenic
states the female presence was banished, thus unbalancing the mentality
and behavior of the warrior, and finally facilitating the emergence of
pederast homosexuality. The whole issue of Spartan femininity was really
inconceivable in the rest of Greece.
The Athenians called the Spartan women fainomérides (“those that

show the thighs”) as a reproach of their freedom of dress. This was
because the Spartans were still using the old Dorian peplos, which was
open in the waist side. It was part of a women’s fashion, more
comfortable and lighter than the female clothing in the rest of Greece:
where fashions flourished of extravagant hairstyles, makeup, jewelry or
perfumes. It was a fashion for healthy Spartan women. But the rest of
Hellas, as far as women are concerned, was already infected with Eastern
customs: which kept them permanently locked up at home; where their
bodies weakened and sick minds developed. The Athenian poet Euripides
(480-406 BCE) was shocked at the fact that the “daughters of the
Spartans… leave home” and “mingle with men showing her thighs.”
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The government
THE GOVERNMENT
“Now once it had struck me that Sparta, despite having one of the
lowest populations, had nonetheless clearly become the most
powerful and most famous in Greece, I wondered how this had
ever happened. But I stopped wondering once I had pondered the
Spartiate institutions, for they have achieved success by obeying
the laws laid down for them by Lycurgus.”
—Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians
The Spartan power was not a cold bureaucratic machine in the dark
about passions and impulses. It was a spiritual being that had taken root
in the soul of every Spartan that was alive and had a will. Spartan leaders
measured their quality in that they were able to be worthy of being
receptacles and transmitters of such will, which was precisely the aim of
their training and their discipline: to become the tools by which the
Spartan state, intangible but irresistible, materialized on Earth and
expressed its will.
The whole organization of Sparta was such a unique and exemplary

power that it deserves that we focus now on its various separate political
institutions, after having addressed nurture, education, the military and
marriage, which were themselves institutions.
A) The dyarchy. The Spartan government was headed by two kings

who ruled together. Being heads of the political, military and religious
power, they carried out the jobs of chief priests and leaders of the Army.
This curious sign of two-headed power came out not only because this
way a king controlled the authority of the other, but as a symbolic stroke
(remember Romulus and Remus) of the ancient, mythical kings.
In the case of Sparta, both kings were symbolically related in
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The government
religious worship with the mythical twins Castor and Pollux,

supernatural giants endowed with overdeveloped senses; sons of Zeus
and members of the männerbund of the Argonauts that, mythologically,
were the first monarchs of the country.
Each king chose two representatives to the oracle of Delphi. In

wartime, only one of the kings was with the army, while the other
remained to rule in the city. The belligerent king was obliged to be the
first to go to war and the last to return. In combat, he also stood in the
place of greatest risk—in the first row on the far right of the phalanx. (In
the first row of the phalanx, composed exclusively of officers, the shields
formed a wall. As the shields were wielded with the left arm and the
weapons with the right, the shield protected the wearer’s left side and the
right of the adjacent comrade. It was a great symbol of fellowship, for the
protection of the right side depended on the adjacent comrade. However,
the warrior who was on the extreme right of the shield lacked a partner to
protect his right side, so he should be especially bold: it was the royal
post.)
It was tradition that the king and the commanders who made war
surround themselves with an elite guard of 300 selected men, the
Hippeis. It is said that a Spartan aspired to this body and, inexplicably,
was glad when he was informed that he had not been admitted. A
foreigner, unaccustomed to the Spartan ways, asked why he rejoiced and
the Spartan answered, with the utmost sincerity, that he was glad that his
country was well protected if you had three hundred men better than
himself.
In the elite guard there always was at least one Spartan that had
been crowned victor in the Olympic games, and certainly there was no
lack of champions in Sparta, as in the various Olympic games from 720
BCE to 576 BCE of eighty-one known winners, forty-six—more than half
—were Spartans; and of thirty-six winners of foot races, twenty-one were
Spartans. And Sparta was the least populous state in Greece and its men
were not “professional” athletes specializing in a particular discipline, but
full-time soldiers for which overall athleticism was a mere hobby. There
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The government
was a Spartan wrestler who someone attempted to bribe to lose in a

competition during the Olympic games. Having refused the bribe and
winning the fight, he was asked: “Spartan, what good has earned your
victory?” He responded with a smile from ear to ear: “I will fight against
the enemy next to my king.” The victors in the Olympic games were
regarded as touched by the gods.
The first kings of Sparta were the twin sons of King Aristodemus;
henceforth, every king came from an ancient and legendary Spartan
family, that of Eurysthenes and Procles, both claiming descent from
Heracles, although Eurysthenes was more revered by virtue of his greater
antiquity.
Strange as it might seem, in all Hellas Spartan monarchy was

regarded as the oldest in the world: a very remote descendant of a line
going back to the very gods and the ancient, “among the snow”
hyperborean homeland of the distant ancestors of the Hellenes.
The princes were not educated in the standard Agoge like the other
Spartan children. Their education strongly emphasized military skill and
strategy, but added the notions of diplomacy and political thought. In
addition, the princes were allowed to double food rations of the rest of
the people.
In short, the monarchy of Sparta had a mystical and sacred character

that permeated their subjects and inspired self-improvement. The kings
were regarded as the embodiment of all that Spartan people had as
divine.
B) The Ephorate. Under the kings—although in practice even more

powerful—was a five ephoroi cabinet (ephors, or “guards”) called
Ephorate. Originally they were the high priests of each of the five villages,
districts or military garrisons that formed the archaic Sparta, but their
power gradually escalated once Lycurgus disappeared; they somehow
became to replace him.
The Ephorate was the most powerful institution of Sparta. It ran
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The government
eugenics, parenting, education, the military and foreign policy, and also
had the power to veto any decision from the Senate or the Assembly.
They served as supreme judges and presided the diplomatic meetings
and assemblies. Two ephors always accompanied the king in season, and
had the power to call the kings to their presence in order to seek
explanations for their behavior if they acted wrong. They even had the
power to arrest or depose them if necessary if an offence was committed,
but they needed divine authorization through an oracle. The ephors, who
were elderly veterans selected for their prestige and wisdom, did not even
stood up in the presence of kings, and it could be said they were their
“overseers,” ensuring that no king was asleep in the laurels or fell into
tyranny.
C) The senate. Under the ephors was the Gerousia, the senate or
council of thirty lifetime gerontes, including the two kings and twenty-
eight other citizens who have passed the age of sixty, selected among the
volunteers from prestigious and old Spartan families. The Spartan senate
tradition came from the thirty military chiefs who swore allegiance to
Lycurgus during his coup.
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The government
D) The assembly. Called Apella or Ecclesia, this assembly was a

popular body that included all Spartan males over thirty years, who
elected the members of the Senate and the Ephorate. Sometimes they
could approve or veto the decisions of the Senate, although they had no
right to question the decisions of the ephors.
E) On the elections. It has been mentioned the existence of elections

to choose leaders. These elections had nothing to do with the current
elections, where the fashionable whim of a sheepish majority imposes an
anonymous, and therefore cowardly vote lacking responsibility and
maturity. In Sparta the ratings were made by acclamation: the candidate
who received the most overwhelming cheers and the most tumultuous
applause triumphed. (Schiller wrote: “the votes should be weighed, not
counted.”) Contrary to what it may seem, this method is smarter than the
incumbent democratic, insofar as it empowered the candidate who
always had the loyalty of the citizens, or at least its most determined
mass, which is what matters.
Do not forget that this citizenship had nothing of a mob since it was
made up only of the Spartan males of more than thirty years whose
loyalty, righteousness and strength were more than proven over twenty-
three years of enormous sacrifices and privations. In case of doubt, they
resorted to a simple method: supporters stood to one side, and the other
to the other side. So the vote was direct and those responsible could be
called into account, in case of wrong decision.
F) Nomocracy: the kings obeying the law. All these institutions and
methods were certainly unique arrangements. Plato, speaking about the
Spartan power said:
Megillus: And yet, Stranger, I perceive that I cannot say,

without more thought, what I should call the government of
Lacedaemon, for it seems to me to be like a tyranny—the
power of our Ephors is marvelously tyrannical; and
sometimes it appears to me to be of all cities the most
democratical; and who can reasonably deny that it is an
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The government
aristocracy? We have also a monarchy which is held for life,

and is said by all mankind, and not by ourselves only, to be the
most ancient of all monarchies; and, therefore, when asked on
a sudden, I cannot precisely say which form of government the
Spartan is [Laws, IV, 712].
The Spartans, however, didn’t split hairs and called their form of
government Eunomia, that is, good order. They also called their system
Cosmos as it was everything they knew: it was the world in which they
moved and was unique with respect to all other systems.
King Archidamus II of Sparta, the son of king Zeuxidamus, when

asked who was in charge of Sparta, responded: “The laws, and the judges
according to the laws.” But these laws were not written down at all, but in
the blood and the scars of the children of Sparta. They dwelt within men
after a long process of training and internalization that made them
suitable depositories. They were not girded dogmas blinded to the
exceptions, but were perfectly flexible and adaptable to various cases.
The kings voluntarily submitted to the laws, as they were considered a
gift that the gods themselves had done to Sparta through the Lycurgus
mediation.
In conclusion, in Sparta Lycurgus’ laws governed, a sort of

nomocracy (as formerly in Brahmanic India or as Judaism to this day), so
they made sure that Lycurgus in Sparta continued to rule even centuries
after his death.
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On the pagan mentality, the religious sentiment of the Spartans, and supremacy over Athens
ON THE PAGAN MENTALITY,

THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT
OF THE SPARTANS, AND
SUPREMACY OVER ATHENS
“And in Lacedaemon and Crete not only men but also women have
a pride in their high cultivation. And hereby you may know that I
am right in attributing to the Lacedaemonians [Lacedaemonia
was the name borne by the city of Sparta from Late Antiquity to
the 19th century] this excellence in philosophy and speculation: If
a man converses with the most ordinary Lacedaemonian, he will
find him seldom good for much in general conversation, but at
any point in the discourse he will be darting out some notable
saying, terse and full of meaning, with unerring aim; and the
person with whom he is talking seems to be like a child in his
hands.”
—Plato, Protagoras
Religion in Sparta played a major role, far above any other Greek state.
Spartan supremacy was not only physical, but spiritual. This apparent
contradiction is explained by the Hellenic religion, drinking directly from
the original Indo-European religion: a religion of the strong—not a
religion of self-pity and worship of the sick, the weak, the downtrodden
and unhappy. In Sparta, also, that religion had been placed at the service
of a shield specifically designed to withstand the rigors of the Iron Age.
Hellenic polytheism was something deeply natural and vital, and is
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inextricably woven to the memory of the blood, as “divinity consists

precisely in that there are Gods and not one god.” Our ancestors made of
their gods spiritual monuments containing all those qualities peculiar to
them that had made them thrive and succeed. They deposited in them
higher feelings with which they gave way and perfected together a being
who existed before in fuzzy and dormant state. The creation of gods is
something capital when valuing a people, for the gods are the
personification of the highest ideals and values of that people. One can
say that the gods created the race, and the race their gods. Through the
gods we can know the people who worshiped them, the same way that
through the people—ourselves, our ancestors, our history and our
brothers—we meet the gods.
The peoples had their gods and the gods had their villages. Sparta
worshiped typical Hellenic deities, although two among them acquired
singularly relevant and important roles and became the most worshiped
deities, even by the time of the Dorian invasion: Apollo and Artemis.
They were twin brothers, reconfirming the cult of “sacred twins.” Their
father was Zeus, the heavenly father; and their mother was Leto,
daughter of Titans, who to escape the jealousy of Hera (Zeus’ heavenly
wife) had to become a she-wolf and run away to the country of the
hyperboreans. Note here the presence of an important symbolic constant,
the heavenly principle (Zeus, eagle, lightning) together with the earthly
principle (Leto, wolf, titan).
Apollo was the son of Zeus and brother of Artemis, god of beauty, of
poetry (he was called “blond archpoet”), music, bow and arrow, youth,
the sun, the day; of manhood, light and pride. He could predict the future
and each year returned from Hyperborea in a chariot drawn by swans.
(As Lohengrin, the king of the Grail, with his boat, and like other
medieval myths about the “Swan Knight” as Helias—obviously a version
of the Roman Helios in France.) Apollo presided over the chorus of the
nine muses, deities that inspired artists, and lived on Mount Helicon. He
was conceived as a young, blond and blue-eyed man, holding a lyre, harp
or bow, and possessor of a manly, clean, youthful and pure beauty
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—“Apollonian” beauty. The mythology explained that in his childhood he

killed the serpent Python (in other versions a dragon), setting in its place,
with the help of the hyperboreans, the sanctuary of Delphi.
Heracles also killed a snake when he was a newborn. Such legends

represent the struggle that initially led the Indo-European invaders
against the telluric gods of the pre-Indo-European peoples. Apollo
received several titles including Phoebus (“radiant”), Aegletes (“light of
the sun”) and Lyceus (“born of wolf,” as in some way were Romulus and
Remus). As equivalents gods of Apollo in other peoples we have Apollo
Phoebus (Roman), Abellio or Belenus (Celtic ), Baldur (German),
Byelobog (Slavs), Lucifer (medieval heretics), Baal (Phoenician), the
Beelzebub demonized by the Church and Belial: another demon of
Christianity.
Apollo was worshiped in the most important festival of Sparta, the

Carnea. There they paid homage to the under-god in the figure of the
ram. To carry out the rituals the priests chose five unmarried men who
for four years should continue a vow of chastity.
Artemis was the sister of Apollo, daughter of Zeus, goddess of night,

moon, bow and arrow; of forests, hunting and virginity, but also of labor
and male fertility. Artemis was usually depicted armed with bow and
silver arrows, wearing a short and light tunic or skins of wild animals,
carrying her hair up and accompanied by a pack of hunting dogs. Her car
was pulled by deer, the animal most associated with her, and in fact she
is sometimes depicted with horns of deer, reminiscent of the most
primitive paganism. She was chaste and virgin in perpetuity, and virgin
were her priestesses, Melissa (“bees,” another symbol of Artemis). She
was harsh, stern, proud, sharp, wild, silent and cold: the result of a
patriarchal work, the only model of female divinity able to command
respect and devotion to such an ascetic and leathery virility as the
Spartan.
The Dorian Artemis equaled the Celtic Artio, the Roman Diana, and
the Slavic Dievana; but she had nothing to do with the Artemis
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worshiped by eunuch priests in the temple of Ephesus (Asia Minor, now

modern Turkey): a goddess of “fertility” often depicted with black skin,
multiple breasts, whimsical hairstyles, a body adornment and other
oriental distortions. (Dievana was conceived by the ancient Slavs as a
virgin goddess associated with hunting and the moon. For the Poles, she
was a young virgin who hunted in the forests. South Slavs imagined her
running through the forests of the Carpathians, and other Slavic peoples
imagined her accompanied by bears or a pack of dogs. All these
configurations correspond clearly to the Greek Artemis or Roman Diana.)
In Greek mythology Artemis was a mentor to the young Atalanta, who
became the best runner of Hellas, and no one, not even a god, was closer
to conquer her than the mortal hero Orion. Apollo and Artemis were,
finally, the sacred twin couple; day and night, sun and moon, gold and
silver. They were the juvenile archetypes of Spartan masculinity and
femininity, respectively.
Sparta venerated the heroes of the Iliad, especially Achilles, but also
Menelaus and Helen, kings of Sparta in Homer’s mythology. Heracles
was practically a Spartan national hero (remember that, according to
tradition, he was the patriarch that founded the royal lineages of Sparta),
and his figure was hugely popular among young men.
The city of Sparta had forty-three temples dedicated to various gods

and twenty-two temples dedicated to the heroes (including those of the
Iliad), whose deeds inspired the flourishing generations; more than
fifteen statues of gods, four altars and numerous funerary tombs. There
was also a temple dedicated to Lycurgus, worshiped as a god. In a city the
size of Sparta, the number of religious buildings was very noticeable.
In religious ceremonies, men and women—particularly those in age

of dating—attended, entirely naked as they did during the processions,
the tournaments, the beauty contests and the dances. This already
implies that the Spartans were not ashamed of their bodies, but that
proudly displayed them whenever they could because they were robust,
well-formed and harmonious. These events were festivals of beauty,
Dionysian ceremonies in which the body was worshiped and beautified
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by effort and sacrifice. According to Plato, a beautiful body promises a

beautiful soul and “beauty is the splendor of truth.”
The athletic custom of shaving the body hair and smear oneself with
oil before a competition was of Spartan origin, although the Celts were
given to body shave before battles. They sought thereby to extol the body;
give relief, volume, detail, brightness and “life” to the muscles, therefore
proudly displaying the result of years and years of grueling physical
training and strenuous efforts, probably with the aim of finding the best
partner and/or gaining prestige.
The guilt and sense of sin that Christianity tried to impose in the
field of body pride made man feel ashamed of the very things he was
proudest. Judeo-Christian morality, by condemning hygiene, care,
training and the preparation of the body as “sinful,” “sensual” and
“pagan” gradually achieved that the European population—converted
into an amorphous herd whose attitude to any hint of divine perfection
was met with resentment and mistrust—forgot that their bodies also were
a creation and a gift from God.
For young people of both sexes such festivals served to became

familiar with each other, because we think that Sparta was a city with few
inhabitants, where thanks to public ceremonies everyone knew
everybody by sight and was integrated into the popular. It was at these
events where you watched and chose your future spouse. The
competition also served to establish hierarchies in beauty, courage,
strength, agility, hardness, endurance, courage, skill and speed; and the
best men would join the best women, as might be the case for the
coronation of a king and a queen in a contest, or a champion and a
championess in a competition. In his Republic Plato said that it is
necessary that the best men join the best women most of the time, and
that the worst men join the worst women; and that you have to raise the
children of the first, not those of the second. Thanks to this, and to the
facilities and even obligations of marriage, the young Spartans married
men and women between twenty and twenty-five years.
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Le us imagine all those pagan cults of sacrifice, struggle, union and

that glorification of the collective existence of a great people. That’s pride
and socialist joy or nationalism, a cult for effort and struggle through
which the Spartans themselves nourished themselves, as the warriors’
deeds made that the youngest would want to match them and beat them,
they longed for their opportunity to demonstrate their flowering
qualities. Moreover, knowledge of the deeds of the society helped
Spartans to know themselves; to be proud of their homeland, and to
become aware of its grandeur and superiority. Everything was wisely
designed for the burning of Spartan pride to last.
What would ritualism in such a “socialist” country be? It was simple

and austere, and the Spartans took it with fanatical solemnity, for all
rituals were perfect and the result flawless. The rites had to be carried out
at whatever cost. It is known that before the battles the Spartans
celebrated a sacrifice, usually a male goat: a fertility sign, and under no
circumstances they fought before the ritual was consummated. There is
the story of how this was practiced to an extreme once the enemy
appeared during the ritual. The Spartans did not move from their
positions until the ending of the ceremonial, even when the first enemy
arrows started the killing and wounding others. When the ritual ended
they fought and won the battle. Such kind of feelings, orbiting around
rites in which they reproduced symbolic events, kept them in contact
with the beyond: where the force of the fallen and the ancient fathers
dwelt.
All these elements contributed to form a highly spiritual feeling: the

Spartan felt himself as the summit of creation, the favorite of the gods, a
privileged, magnificent, splendid, arrogant and godlike creature; a
member of a holy seed, a holy race and lucky “link in the eternal racial
chain,” a protagonist of an unparalleled feat of an extremely profound
mystical experience that he was convinced would end up leading him
directly to the immortality of Olympus, as the semi-divine heroes he
worshiped. He was proud of being a Spartiate because precisely the fact
that to become one of them it was necessary to overcome the hardest
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ordeals made him feel a holder of a privilege.
Nietzsche said, “For a tree to reach Heaven with its branches, it must
first touch Hell with its roots,” and it is said that Odin went down to the
huts before ascending to the palaces. This implies that only after passing
the most terrible tests the warrior has earned the right to access to higher
states, on pain of suffering the degradation to which it leads the drunken
arrogance of the one who has not hardened in suffering and is not able to
take the pleasure, power and luxury with respect, care, gentleness,
veneration, humility and an almost apprehensive appreciation. The
Spartans had reached the bottom, sinking into the whole tragedy of their
atrocious instruction, and also had passed through all the manly
sensations of fullness, health, vigor, strength, power, force, dominion,
glory, victory, joy, camaraderie, reward and triumph. Having covered the
whole emotional range that goes from pain to pleasure made them
possessors of a wisdom exclusive for the heroes and the fallen, and surely
no one could appreciate more the significance and importance of
pleasures than the Spartans.
It existed in Sparta, as in other places, an initiating circle of priests

and priestesses. Little is known about them except that they were
selected men and women, initiated at specific sites in secret ceremonies
called “mysteries,” which made them the repositories of ancient wisdom
and esoteric mystical orientation. In Greece, the mysteries represented
what could not be explained rationally with words, but that was
necessary to see and live it. The mysteries (of Delphi, Eleusis, Delos,
Samothrace, Orpheus, etc.) became prestigious initiation schools, with
important people attending from all Hellas with intent of awakening the
spirit. Much of what we know of them is related to a decadent age which
had betrayed the secret, so the ritual was monstrously disfigured and the
true mysteries gone.
Mount Taygetos, symbol of pride and elitism of Sparta, was also

called Mount Dionysius because it was there where the Spartans
worshiped this god in a mystery of elaborate ritual ceremonies, the
mysteries of Dionysus. Dionysus is a kind of Hellenic Shiva (in
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Hinduism, Shiva is said to meditate on the top of Mount Meru): a divine,

destructive and dancing archetype. Much confusion has arisen around
Dionysus, so we will try to clean up the image of this god.
The mythology explained that Dionysus was the son of Zeus (a

masculine and heavenly principle) and of some earthly goddess (an
earthly, feminine principle) that, according to some versions, is Demeter,
Persephone and Semele. Dionysius had been torn (like the Egyptian
Osiris and the Vedic Purusha) and eaten by the Titans (chthonic entities)
but, as the Titans ended up breeding men, all men have within them a
spark of Dionysus. Zeus could save the heart of Dionysus and, planting it
in the womb of his mother (in other versions, in Zeus’ thigh), Dionysus
was reborn and rose to the rank of “twice born.”
Dionysus was the god of the strong instincts, of the fullness of life,
spiritual abundance, the joy of life, transparent pleasure, gratitude; the
joyful and furious frenzy of happiness that, wanting earthly eternity,
needs the children. It was par excellence the god of the healthy and
strong: of that popular pagan joy that overflows and creates in its
abundant happiness—or destroys in its unbridled rage—; the god of the
instincts that make one feel alive and rise the race above its material
limitations or from everyday pettiness.
Over time, however, as Hellas was losing its purity, the cult of
Dionysus was easily perverted (being a god of bodily, material and “dark”
impulses) and became a fat god of orgies: a noisy god of amusements,
alcohol, promiscuity and insane hysteria. The Romans adopted this
deformed god as Bacchus, and his followers (mostly cowardly, decadent,
perverted, morbid and boring women of good families) made the cult
degenerate into orgies including blood sacrifices, promiscuous sex and
alcohol poisoning. It was such a scandal formed around the Bacchanalia
that the senate of Rome in 186 BCE forbade it and exterminated its
followers in a great slaughter.
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The supremacy over Athens

At this point, we must address the issue that will certainly be around
the heads of many readers: the comparison Sparta-Athens. What city was
“better”?
Often we are told that Athens represented the artistic and spiritual
summit of Greece and Sparta the physical and warrior evolution. It’s not
as easy as that. We must start from the basis that it is a great mistake to
judge the development of a society for its commercial or material
advancement. This would lead us to conclude that the illiterate
Charlemagne was lower than anybody else present, or Dubai the home of
the world’s most exalted civilization.
It is necessary to better assess the spirituality, health, individual

quality and the genetic background of which a society is depository. This
could ground us in unusual lands, for instance, that the Cro-Magnon
culture was highest that has stepped on the planet. As already
mentioned, not without reason it has been said that the whole Spartan
state was an order, a union of warrior-monks, as the Spartans zealously
cultivated a discipline and ancient wisdom that most Greek states had
lost. Many have noticed that the harsh Spartan discipline practices have a
distinctively touch of a warrior yoga, meaning that any ascetic yoga
practice would help the physical, mental and spiritual improvement. In
Sparta everything worked within the mystique and the uttermost
devotion of the people of Greece, and it is a huge mistake to believe that
the only polished Spartan instruction was the body.
Thus we come to the important subject of art. It usually happens

that it is a common argument to vilify Sparta. The Spartans used to say
that they carved monuments in the flesh, which implied that their art was
a living one: literally them, and the individuals that composed their
homeland.
But Sparta also had conventional art as understood in the present. It

was famous throughout Greece for its music and dance (of which nothing
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has survived), as well as its highly-prized poetry that has come to us

fragmented. Its architects and sculptors were employed in such
prestigious places as Delphi and Olympia, and imposed a stamp of
straight simplicity and crystal clarity in their works. The best example of
this is the sober Doric style, direct heritage of Sparta that became a
model not only for countless temples throughout Greece, as the
Parthenon in Athens itself, but also for the classic taste of later Europe
that has endeavored to continue the legacy of Greece and Rome.
The Greeks, and particularly the Spartans, studied “physiognomy” to

interpret the character, personality, and ultimately the soul of an
individual based on physical features, especially of the face to the point
that ugliness in certain Greek states was practically a curse. It was also
believed that beauty and a willingness of the features should be an
expression of noble qualities necessary for a beautiful body bearer, if only
dormant. The creators of the Greek statues made them with that
knowledge of the human face and of the perfect proportions in mind, and
therefore represented not only a beautiful body but also a beautiful body
carrying a beautiful soul. The blind rage with which the Christians
destroyed most Greek statues indicates that they greatly feared what they
represented, because in them the Hellenes fixed and settled, once and for
all, as a goal and template and ideal: the human type that Christianity
would never be able to produce.
Many other states, on the other hand, suffered from a taste for the
exotic and the cosmopolitan in which all empires fall when they neglect
their attention, authenticity and identity. Gobineau called Athens the
most Phoenician of the Greek cities (Essay on the Inequality of Human
Races, Book IV, Chapter IV). Athens, with the plutocracy of Piraeus; with
its mob of merchants, charlatans, noisy slaves, acrobats, pseudo-
intellectuals, pundits, soothsayers and false Egyptian magicians;
sumptuous clothes, rich food, spices, incense, colors, flavors, perfumes,
obscene riches, deformed mystery cults, orgiastic ceremonies,
prostitution, alcoholism, dirt, disease, and finally rampant decay in
demagoguery including cosmopolitanism, hedonism, homosexuality,
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multiculturalism and miscegenation, was farther from the European

ideal than Sparta, which did not embrace this filth (only when it was not
Sparta anymore). Spartiates remained essentially rustic, rough and
authentic.
In Athens there emerged countless philosophical schools (some of

them, as the sophists and cynics, reflecting a clearly decadent spirit)
which attests the chaos and contradictions within the Athenian citizens
and the Athenian national body itself. Demagoguery and the sagacity of
the slave, the shopkeeper, the merchant, the Phoenician dealer, and the
nomad of the desert began to leave a mark. And this is acclaimed by
historians of philosophy that teach today (Julius Evola pointed out the
pleasure with which modern civilization sees in Athens the origin of
democracy). In Sparta people did not ramble or speculated because its
inhabitants knew the laws of the land, the sky and the species; and lived
in agreement with them with no hustle, speculation, or absurd
discussions.
The Athenians despised them because they considered the Spartans

brutal and simple. The Spartans despised Athenians because they
considered them soft and effeminate even though the Athenians, as
Greeks, were also great athletes—though never to the level of the
Spartans. It is said that a Spartan who contemplated a painting depicting
victorious Athenians was asked “Are those Athenians brave?” He replied
“Yes, in painting.”
There was a latent rivalry between the Ionian people of an Athens

influenced by Asia Minor, and the Dorian people of Sparta directly
influenced by their own Nordic heritage, who never stopped being
governed by anything but their ancestral tradition and their own popular
consciousness. With the exception of Athens, which saw herself as the
best, all other Hellenic states reserved their admiration for Sparta, seeing
it as a shrine of wisdom and justice: the true repository of primitive
Hellenic tradition. Sparta was always the most famous and respected city
among the Greeks. They always resorted to it to arbitrate interstate
disputes, and most of the times they not even had to resort to force:
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Sparta sent an ambassador to which everyone would voluntarily submit,

like a divine envoy.
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The Spartan politics for their inferiors: the crypteia
THE SPARTAN POLITICS FOR THEIR

INFERIORS: THE CRYPTEIA
“Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without
blushing.”
—George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
The Spartans kept themselves segregated from non-Spartans to keep

their valuable essence undisturbed. Not only racism and aloofness, but
the lack of mercy towards their slaves were for the Spartiate a vital
necessity that soothed his paranoia in the short-term and also renewed it
the long-term. Let us turn our attention, then, to the outcome of the
acute racism among the Spartans.
The situation of caste stratification in Sparta was unique, because

the life of the aristocracy was much tougher than the life of the people.
That did not happen in other civilizations, where the common people
wanted to take over the way of life of the dominant caste. The Helots did
not want—in the least—to submit themselves to the ruthless discipline of
the Spartan life compared with which the cultivation of the soil was
simple, smooth and painless.
It was the ephors who, each year, with the greatest solemnity
declared war on the Helots; that is, they authorized to kill freely without
it being considered murder. Once a year, the Helots were beaten in public
for no reason; each Helot should be beaten a number of times every year
just to remember that he was still a slave. And when the government
thought they had bred too much or suspected they planned uprisings, the
crypteia or krypteia took place.
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Crypteia is a word that means “hidden,” “occult” or even “secret”

and “underground” (words with the particle crypto derive from this),
taking the name from a test of the deep symbolism that many Spartan
boys of instruction age had to submit. Alone, barefoot, without warm
clothes and provided only with a knife, the chosen Spartan lad was
thrown into inhabited Helot lands. He remained long time hiding in the
daylight hours, obtaining his food from nature and living outdoors.
During the dark hours, stealthy he stalked Helots and entered into their
roads and their properties quietly and silently: killing as many of them
that he could, stealing food and probably removing some bloody trophy
that demonstrated the success of his hunt. Thousands of Helots fell this
way throughout the history of Sparta and probably many young Spartans
as well.
This ordeal has been considered as a military exercise or a baptism

of blood and a warrior initiation ritual. Some have even elevated the
importance of the crypteia institution to the level of initiation: a kind of
secret service composed of the most fanatical cubs of promising
Spartans, designed specifically to contain the growth of the Helots and
keep them psychologically subjugated, and revitalize the tension between
the two ends of the scale that made the Laconia State.
The young Spartan, after years of living in nature, had become

accustomed to it. The long days of loneliness made his senses sharpen;
get used to sniff the air, and feel like a real predator. At night he
descended down the mountain to fall upon his victims with all the
ferocity that his racism endowed; his training, and his natural disposition
to sacrifice and death, hiding afterwards. After completing the mission he
returned victorious to his home. This was the culmination of the guerrilla
training, confirming that the Spartans were not herd animals but also
lone wolves: great fighters in droves (not herd because the herd is
hierarchical), and able to manage by themselves when needed: excellent
collective soldiers in open warfare but also fearsome individual fighters
in that elusive, dark, and dirty war so characteristic of the Iron Age.
This guerrilla training could have originated since the first
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Messenian war, in which the military formations were destroyed and they
had to resort to hand strikes; ambushes and assassinations taking
advantage of what the field (forest, mountains, towns) could offer, the
tactical situation (unprotected, unarmed, distracted or careless enemy)
and the environmental conditions (night, darkness, fog). But this mode
of combat was also devised as a way of preparing to resist if Sparta fell
under his enemies and suffered a military occupation. In the event of
such a catastrophe, every Spartan male was ready to flee to the woods or
forest with nothing; survive on his own, and run selective attacks and
ambushes on the enemy. It was, therefore, a form of leaderless
resistance. Another event taken into account was a Messenian rebellion
in which the rebels withdrew to the fields; Sparta being embroiled in a
nasty guerrilla war to hunt them down and exterminate them slowly.
This, as we shall see, duly took place.
Another example that describes the lack of scruples of the Spartans

with their inferiors is provided by the following incident, which occurred
in 424 BCE.
The Spartan government had reason to believe that the Helots were
going to rebel. After a battle in which the Spartans hired recruits, they
liberated 2,000 of those Helots who had distinguished themselves for
valor in combat. After having organized a banquet to celebrate it and
placed laurels on their heads, the ephors ordered to kill them all. Those
2,000 men disappeared in the woods without a trace and no more was
heard of them. And as the bravest Helots had been eliminated in this
immense crypteia, Helot population, bereft of leaders, did not rebel. We
can imagine the psychological effect that the massacre had on their
compatriots. This story made evident how far the Spartans abandoned all
chivalry, code of honor or moral behavior when they thought they were
defending the existence of their people.
Another Spartan law with racist connotations was to prohibit hair

dyes. In the rest of Greece dyes were common; as were blonde wigs, the
methods of hair bleaching and the elaborate and extravagant hairstyles
like those of Babylon or Etruria (and later in decadent Rome). At one
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stage of the devolution, when the original native breed in Greece was
being diluted by miscegenation, the dyes and the concoctions for hair
bleaching were highly prized, especially among women. The same would
happen in decadent Rome: Roman wigs were made with the golden hair
taken from female German prisoners.
In Sparta the influx of foreigners was jealously limited. It was only

possible to visit Sparta for pressing reasons. Similarly, the very Spartans
were rarely allowed to travel abroad, and even the slave trade was
banned. This was motivated by the interest of the elite that its core would
not be not corrupted by the softness of foreign customs. The Spartans
undoubtedly were great xenophobes.
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War
WAR
My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I am, and was
ever, your counterpart. And I am also your best enemy. So let me
tell you the truth!
I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye are not great
enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not
to be ashamed of them!
“What is good?” ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say:
“To be good is what is pretty, and at the same time touching.”
They call you heartless: but your heart is true, and I love the
bashfulness of your goodwill. Ye are ashamed of your flow, and
others are ashamed of their ebb.
Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto

you by me—and it is this: man is something that is to be
surpassed.
So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long
life! What warrior wisheth to be spared!
I spare you not, I love you from my very heart, my brethren in

war!—
—Nietzsche
War for the Spartans was a real party as, during wars, they relaxed the
cruder aspects of the controls and solid discipline. They permitted that
the soldiers beautified their weapons, armor, clothes and hair. They
softened the harshness of the exercises and allowed a less severe
disciplinary regime in general, plus larger and complete meals.
Consequently, for them “the war was a break from the preparing for
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War
war,” as Plutarch wrote, and this made them subconsciously prefer war
to peace.
Each Spartan was a hoplite (a word that comes from hoplon, shield),
a formidable war machine, a weapon of mass destruction, an elite soldier
infantry: well trained, armed and equipped with the best of his time—a
weight of approximately seventy pounds.
The Spartan soldier wore:
• A two-meter spear (which also had a tip at its lower end in

order to finish off the fallen).
• A shield (hoplon or aspis) of ninety centimeters in diameter,

weighing nine kilos and lined with bronze. In the center of the
shield a bee of natural size was painted (remember that the bee
was an attribute of the goddess Artemis). They were always told
that the optimum distance for the attack was that where the bee
could be clearly distinguished.
• A dagger.
• An armor made of metal plates that allowed some mobility.
• A helmet designed to cover the entire head and the face with
holes for the eyes, nose and mouth. It probably evolved from a
more primitive model, as used by the Germans, which usually
consisted of a cap that protected the face and skull; a bump
down the brow to protect the nose, and two bumps on the sides
covering the ears or cheeks, whose purpose was to protect the
winged attacks to the head.
• Greaves that protected the shins and knees.
• A sword called xyphos which hung on the left thigh, and was
particularly short to be controlled from compact rows where the
hindrance of a long sword was not welcome. The Athenians
made fun of the short length of the Spartan swords and the
Spartans answered, “He who is not afraid to approach the
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War
enemy does not require long swords.”
The Spartan Hoplite also wore a coat. It was red to disguise the color
of blood. The visible colors were, then: the red coat, the golden bronze,
and the white and black crest, in some places of checkerboard design, like
a dualistic sign. (The custom of wearing red textile with the specific goal
of disguising the blood also occurred with the Roman legionaries and the
imperial British military, the “Redcoats.”)
The Spartan hoplites were barefoot during battle because their feet
were so tanned that their skin was tougher than any footwear. With them
they could climb rocks and stomp on rough snow or spines without even
noticing. Their shield—a most important tool and a symbol of
camaraderie whose loss was a disgrace (as for the Germans, according to
Tacitus)—showed off the Greek letter lambda (Λ / λ), the equivalent to
the Rune Laf, representing the sound “L” as initial of Laconia,
Lacedaemonia and Lycurgus; although the rune Ur (sometimes
represented exactly like the lambda and symbolizing virility) may be a
more appropriate “translation.” The phrase associated with this rune
was: “Know yourself and know everything.” At the oracle of Delphi it was
written, “Know thyself” on a temple, so that the rune Ur again fits
perfectly in the Spartan context.
Let us now turn our attention to the Spartan warriors. How were the
clashes? The captains harangued their men with a traditional formula,
“Go ahead, armed sons of Sparta, come into the dance of Ares.” In battle
they marched in tightly-closed ranks; with calm, discipline and gravity,
relying on the immeasurable strength of all their instruction, to the
sound of a flute and singing the solemn song of marches known as the
Paean, a hymn to Apollo. It was a type of flute traversière which sound is
closely associated with the infantry, especially in the eighteenth century.
The sound conveyed trust, safety, lightness and a serene joy.
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War
Illustration of a Spartan hoplite. The arms show that the Spartan is terribly
muscularly and roasted by the sun and air, since he has been permanently exposed
throughout his life. The illustration has some flaws, however. The sword, which should be
holstered on the left side of the hip, is absent or not visible. The bronze helmet, shield and
greaves on the legs should be shiny as gold, not worn off as the Spartans beautified and
polished their weapons and armor, which were clean at the time of combat. There are also
extra sandals in the illustration as the Spartans were always barefoot. And the hair color is
too dark.
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War
This close formation was called the phalanx, of which the Spartans
were the greatest teachers of leading tactics that other Greek strategists
considered extremely complicated. Shields formed an impenetrable wall
from which soldiers, in serried ranks, side by side, shoulder to shoulder
and shield to shield, stabbed and cut with spears and swords. The
Macedonians and the Romans (even, in their way, the Spanish troops
and the armies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) inherited this
form of combat that put emphasis on the close order. John Keegan, in his
History of Warfare, explains it well:
Crossing a no man’s land perhaps 150 yards wide at a clumsy

run, under a weight of armor and weapons of seventy pounds,
the ranks drove straight into each other. Each individual
would have chosen another as his target at the moment of
contact, thrusting his spear point at some gap between shield
and shield, and seeking to hit a patch of flesh not covered by
armor—throat, armpit or groin. The chance was fleeting. As
the second and subsequent ranks were brought up short by the
stop in front, the phalanx concertinaed, throwing the weight of
seven men on to the back of the warriors engaged with the
enemy. Under this impact some men inevitably went down at
once, dead, wounded, or overborne from the rear.
That might create a breach in the shield wall. Those in the

second or third ranks strove to open it wider with their spears,
thrusting and jabbing from their relatively protected position
at whoever they could reach. If it widened, there followed the
othismos, ‘push with shield’, to widen it further and to win
room in which swords, the hoplite’s secondary weapon, might
be drawn and used to slash at an enemy’s legs. The othismos
was the most certain method, however: it could lead to the
pararrexis or ‘breaking’, when the most heavily beset by the
enemy’s pressure began to feel the impulse to flight, and either
broke from the rear ranks or, more shamefully, struggled
backward from the point of killing to infect their comrades
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War
with panic also.
As we see, it was a kind of war requiring very good preparation; a

methodical fighting type that contrasted with the previous “barbarian”
combat: more open, freer, individualistic and furious. The evolution of
war marked the evolution of the people. They had discovered that they
were stronger together and well coordinated, as if they were a single
entity, a god.
All the changes of direction or attack were communicated by the

music of the fifes. Today, in the military close order, orders can be given
with a bugle, each melody is a determined order. The closed order of
modern armies is simply a legacy of the spirit of the Spartan phalanx:
socialist institutions to the core. In spite of the fact that close order is no
longer the key to success in combat, it is undeniable that it reinforces
collective coordination, camaraderie, pride, the esprit de corps and
ceremonial rituals that so matter in our day, and the difference that
converting a set of men into a unit can make.
The battles were bloody and cruel. Obviously, the fighting was hand
to hand and the attacks made by cutting or piercing through the body
with sharp edges or tips of extremely sharp metal blades, which caused
terrible injuries and mutilations. As a result, many suffered war wounds
or were maimed. What did these crippled do in a state like Sparta? They
just turned up in the battle with the greatest fanaticism to accelerate their
own destruction and the arrival of glory. It was normal to see mutilated
veterans (remember Miguel de Cervantes), blind, lame or maimed in the
ranks of Spartan combatants. A stranger asked a blind hoplite why he
would fight in such a state. The blind man said that “at least I’ll chip the
sword of the enemy.”
The Spartans marching into battle always received the shield from
their mothers, who delivered them with the severe words, “With it or on
it”: back with the shield or on the shield, victory or death; because if
someone fell in battle the comrades carried the body, and then his ashes,
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War
on the shield. (The Spartans, like all Indo-Europeans from Scandinavia

to India, practiced cremation burial ritual.) The shield was thus a lunar
symbol equivalent to the cup, which collects the solar essence of fallen
hero and, as a cup, related to the archetype of the woman. In fact, a
woman delivering the shield is a fairly common archetypal motif in
European art of all eras. The shield had, as a talisman, the power to
protect not only ourselves but the comrades in arms, so it should be
considered almost magical.
The doctrine of loyalty, war, and resurrection of the hero allowed the
Spartans to march to the fiercest fighting with a calm serenity and joy
that nowadays few would understand and many repudiate. Knowing that
they would be unable to do such a thing what is left is vilifying the one
who, for self-worth and inner will, was capable of doing it. Before the
fighting, tranquility was obvious among them: some combed, cleaned or
carefully tended their hair. Others brightened their breastplates and
helmets; cleaned and sharpened their weapons, made athletic exercises
or measured each other in boxing or wrestling. Even before the legendary
battle of Thermopylae, the Persians observers reported an astonished
Xerxes that the Spartans were fighting among themselves and combing
the hair.
Camaraderie, forged in difficult situations, even in the face of death,

was an important part of Spartan society, as it reinforced the union and
mutual confidence. The cult of strength, competition and manhood made
the comrades in arms to exceed and protect each other. Often an adult
men took under his wing a young person or child, although in this case
the relationship was like that of the master and pupil, as was the
relationship between Achilles (the young, temerarious and vigorous
hero) and Patroclus (his prudent and wise mentor, older than him): a
relationship that without any justification has been classified simply as
homosexual by certain media groups. Something similar to the defaming
process of the Achilles-Patroclus relationship has occurred regarding
lesbianism. The way that our current society averts healthy people from
the Greek ideal, the Indo-European ideal, is to ridicule it and claim that
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War
homosexuality was absolutely normal in Greece by means of pulling out

from the sleeve sodomite and lesbian relationships from any reference of
fellowship, mastership, devotion and friendship. And this is where
modern historiography, clearly serving the interests of social
engineering, has gotten his big nose.
The pace of life that the Spartan male bore was of an intensity to kill
a herd of rhinos, and not even the women of Sparta would have been able
to stand it. Thus the world of the Spartan military was a universe in itself
—a universe of men. On the other hand, the intense emotional
relationship, the cult of virility and the camaraderie that existed between
teacher and student, in phalanx combat and throughout society, has
served to fuel these days the myth of homosexuality. On this, Xenophon
wrote:
The customs instituted by Lycurgus were opposed to all of

these [what other Greek states did, nominally Athens and
Corinth]. If someone, being himself an honest man, admired a
boy’s soul and tried to make of him an ideal friend without
reproach and to associate with him, he approved, and believed
in the excellence of this kind of training. But if it was clear that
the attraction lay in the boy’s outward beauty, he banned the
connexion as an abomination; and thus he caused lovers to
abstain from boys no less than parents abstain from sexual
intercourse with their children and brothers and sisters with
each other. [Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, 2].
The relationship between man and teenager in Sparta was that of

teacher-student, based on respect and admiration: a workout, a way of
learning, instruction in their own way. The sacredness of the teacher-
student or instructor-aspirant institution has been challenged by our
society for a while, just as the männerbund. Yet, both types of
relationships are the foundation of the unity of the armies. Today,
children grow up in the shadow of the feminine influence of the female
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War
teachers, even through adolescence. It is difficult to know to what extent

the lack of male influence limits their wills and ambitions, making them
gentle beings, malleable and controllable: what is good for the globalist
system.
Others spoke about the Spartan institution of love between master

and disciple, but always made it clear that this love was “chaste.” The
Roman Aelian said that if two Spartan men “succumbed to temptation
and indulged in carnal relations, they would have to redeem the affront
to the honor of Sparta by either going into exile or taking their own lives”
(at the time exile was considered worse than death).
It is noteworthy that if homosexuality was indeed so natural to the

original Hellenes as it was for the Greeks of decadent states, Hellenic
mythology would be infested with explicit references to such
relationships, which is not, as homosexuality was a plague outside the
Hellenic spirit that appeared when Greece was already declining. By the
time of Plato, for example, homosexuality was beginning to be tolerated
in Athens itself. However, ancient and even some modern authors make
it clear that Sparta did not fall in this filth. The fallacy that homosexuality
was “traditional” and well regarded in Greece is refuted in detail in the
article “El mito derrumbado.”
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The Battle of Thermopylae as an example of heroism
THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE

AS AN EXAMPLE OF HEROISM
“A desperate fight remains for all time a shining example. Let us
remember Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans!”
—The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)
This is one of the most famous battles in history. It decided the future of
Europe and in it the Spartans showed the world their immense quality.
The Battle of Thermopylae came framed within the context of the Greco-
Persian Wars, which catalyst was the expansion of the Greek presence in
Asia Minor with the extension of the Greek colonies to the east. During
the Greco-Persian Wars emperor Darius of Persia had been defeated in
the famous battle of Marathon (490 BCE), after which Sparta and Athens
signed a military pact aimed at the defense of Greece against the Persians
in the near future. Darius was succeeded on his death in 485 BCE by the
very ambitious Xerxes, who craved to take over large parts of Europe.
Persia was a vast reign ruled by an Iranian aristocracy, the

descendants of the Medes, who along with the Persians before them and
after the Parthians monopolized, during their existence, the domain of
the empire—the largest in the world—, stretching from Turkey to
Afghanistan.
Persia was a united and centralized state with vast crowds, massive
and specialized armies and endless tracts of land. Its existence was
already a feat worthy of those who made it possible. Although the
background of this empire was clearly Indo-European it had become an
abyss of miscegenation, as it held sway over a wide variety of non-Indo-
European peoples, including Jews and the descendants of the ancient
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Mesopotamian civilizations. The Punics of Carthage (in what today is

Tunisia) in alliance with Persia were ready to strike the Greek dominions
in Italy and Sicily. Europe faced foreign hordes, a geopolitical meddling
and a flood of eastern blood of magnitude not seen since the Neolithic.
Greece, on the other hand, besides being infinitely smaller, was not
even a state but covered a balkanized collection of city-states or poleis
that often warred with each other. There was no empire—that would
come with the Macedonians. The ethnic heritage was, on the whole, more
Indo-European in Greece than in Persia, and the strong political
personality of the Hellenic polis made of Greece the only major obstacle
of the Persian conquest of the Balkans and the Danube.
In the year 481 BCE, before invading Greece, Persia sent two
ambassadors to Sparta offering the possibility of surrender. King
Leonidas made them to be directly thrown into a well. This impulsive act,
little “diplomatic” and highly condemnable, has an explanation. Leonidas
had not been raised exactly as a Spartan prince because in first place the
throne did not correspond to him. There was a king, but had poor health
and did not survive. His succession fell on the following fellow in line,
which had been brought up as a prince in anticipation to the health
problems of the previous king. This one, however, fell in battle and
suddenly Leonidas found himself in the throne of Sparta, having been
raised as a common Spartan boy without the diplomatic finesse imparted
in princely education. Leonidas was a soldier: blunt, simple and to the
point.
It is clear, in any case, that the Ephorate did not consider just the
murder of the ambassadors, as it sent two Spartan volunteers to go to
Persia, submitted to Xerxes and offered as sacrifice to “atone” for the
injustice that Leonidas committed against the ambassadors. Xerxes
rejected the offer and let them go. He did not make a similar mistake, or
get his hands dirty with blood or being found guilty of dishonor. The
Athenians were more sensible: when the Persian ambassadors made
their bids, they simply declined.
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That same year, Xerxes sent emissaries to all the Greek cities except
Sparta and Athens, requesting their submission. Many, terrified of his
power, subjected while others, prudently, remained neutral although
their sympathies lie with Greece. Sparta and Athens, seeing that an anti-
Hellenic alliance was emerging, called for the other cities to form an
alliance against Persia. Few responded. Persia was the new superpower,
the new star. Its sweeping advance was a fact and its ultimate triumph,
almost a given.
Persia began shipping its army, the largest in the world, and moved
to Europe to conquer Greece. According to Herodotus, the Persian army
consisted of 2 million men. Today, some have reduced this figure to
250,000 or even 175,000 men (including 80,000 cavalry), but it is still a
massive army: a crushing and brutal numerical entity, especially
compared with the tiny Greek force. As the Persian tide moved, all the
villages it passed submitted without a fight.
Hellenic allies then met in Corinth. Envoys from Sparta, Athens,

Corinth, Thebes, Plataea, Thespiae, Phocis, Thessaly, Aegina and others,
parleyed on the strategy. They formed the Peloponnesian League,
confirming the Hellenic alliance to boldly resist Persia. All Peloponnese
poleis (excluding Argos, a traditional and stubborn enemy of Sparta)
joined the alliance. The league was put in command by Sparta; Leonidas
was made commander in chief of the troops of the league. The leagues
were common occurrences in Greece, and they expressed the more
“federalist” trends that somehow sought unification and a proper Pan-
Hellenic nation. Some leagues were created only to face a common
enemy, dissolving themselves afterwards and other leagues lingered;
always pursuing political goals and long-term business. The
Peloponnesian League was one of these ephemeral “emergency leagues.”
An army of 10,000 was formed of Peloponnesian Greeks under the

command of Sparta. Since they had agreed to defend the passage of
Tempe, they were stationed on the slopes of Mount Olympus, in
northeastern Greece. However, King Alexander I of Macedon, who had
good relations with Persia but felt sympathy for the Greeks and especially
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for Sparta, warned the Spartan commanders that the position was
vulnerable by the presence of several pathways, and they decided to
abandon it in favor of another more defensible position. At that time the
Thessalians, considering themselves lost, submitted to Persia.
The definitive site for the defense of Greece was established in the
pass of Thermopylae, the “Hot Gates.” According to legend, Heracles had
rushed into the water to appease the inner fire that tormented him,
turning it instead in thermal waters. The area was basically a narrow
passage between the steep mountain and the sea. At its narrowest the
gorge was 15 meters wide. This meant that although the Greeks were
numerically lower, at least the fighters would face a funnel that balanced
the scale, as only a certain number of warriors from each side could fight
at once. And yet it was a desperate move, as the Greeks would soon tire
while the Persians always counted with waves of fresh troops.
According to Herodotus, after coming to the sanctuary of Delphi, the

Spartans received from the oracle the following prophecy:
For you, inhabitants of wide-wayed Sparta,

Either your great and glorious city must be wasted by Persian
men,
Or if not that, then the bound of Lacedaemon
must mourn a dead king, from Heracles’ line.
The might of bulls or lions will not restrain him with opposing
strength;
for he has the might of Zeus.
I declare that he will not be restrained until he utterly tears apart
one of these.
Or a king of Sparta died, or Sparta fell. Consider how this prophecy

could have influenced Leonidas. Suddenly, a heavy burden of
responsibility on his shoulders had been downloaded. This monstrous
doom, that would kill of shock most and make them sweat and shake,
was received by the king with dignity and sense of royal duty. The
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mission of any Spartan was sacrificing his life for his country if needed. It
was natural and joyful for them.
In the summer of 480 BCE, the Peloponnesian troops reached

Thermopylae and camped up there. There were about eighty men of
Mycenae, 200 of Phlius, 400 of Corinth, 400 of Thebes, 500 of Mantinea,
500 of Tegea, 700 of Thespiae, 1,000 of Phocis, 1,120 of Arcadia and all
the men of Locris. The Athenians were absent because they had put their
hoplites and commitment to the naval fleet, which also was ridiculous
compared to the Persian navy. But the gang that should have received
cheers and applause, the formation whose mere presence instilled
courage and confidence to all military buildup, was the group that
showed only 300 Spartans for battle. No more Spartans came because
their city was celebrating a religious holiday, which prohibited Army
mobilization. And for the Spartans, the first and most important was to
make peace with the gods and not violate the ritual order of existence.
So the Greeks were together about 7,000—seven thousand Greeks

against 250,000 Persians (175,000 according to other modern
historians). Imagine the variety of the colorful congregation: the
brightness of the bronze, the solemn atmosphere, the commentaries on
the diverse gangs, the emblems on the shields, the typical rivalry gossip
in the military, the feeling of togetherness, respect and a common
destiny. The entire camp had to be surrounded by an aura of manliness
and heroism. These Greeks, mostly hoplites, were well instructed. Since
their younger days they were used to handling weapons and exercise the
body. However, the only “professional” army was the Spartan, because in
other places the hoplites lived with their families, trained on their own
and were only called in case of war; while in Sparta they were
permanently militarized since childhood under the terrible discipline
that characterized them, and never stopped the training.
Among the Persians, however, the situation was very different.

Although undoubtedly they had the numerical advantage and equipment,
most were young men who had been conscripted and had little military
training. However, they had highly specialized units. Unlike the Greeks,
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who, conditioned by their land, had stubbornly perfected the infantry

level, the Persians had a formidable cavalry, chariots and excellent
archers. In the vast plains, plateaus and steppes of Asia, to dominate this
type of highly mobile forms of warfare was essential. The Persian Empire
also had “the immortals,” a famous elite unit composed of ten thousand
chosen among the Persian and Median aristocracy that, under General
Hydarnes, formed the royal guard of Xerxes. The officers also consisted
of Persian members of the aristocracy.
Xerxes camped his troops at the entrance, in Trachis. Leonidas, as

soon he reached Thermopylae, rebuilt the ancient wall of two meters in
the narrowest part of the pass, quartering the troops behind him. Having
been informed that there was a path around the pass that led to the other
side, he sent a thousand Phocaeans to defend it.
Xerxes, who could not conceive that the Greeks be obstinate in

fighting, sent an emissary to parley with Leonidas, encouraging him to
put his arms aside. The soldier’s laconic reply was “Come and catch
them.” That night, when a Locris hoplite of defeatist tone commented
that the cloud of Persian archers’ arrows would darken the sky and turn
the day into night, Leonidas answered: “Then we’ll fight in the shade.”
The next morning, the troops appeared in ranks of formation. The

Persians had gathered thousands of Medes and Kysios (Iranian peoples)
and stationed at the entrance of the pass. At first, their orders were to
capture alive the Greeks, as the Emperor thought he could place chains
on them and display them in Persia as trophies, the style of the later
Roman triumphs. Leonidas, meanwhile, made the Greeks form in the
narrow gorge, and took his royal position at the right end of the phalanx.
He decided not to mix the different peoples of his contingent. In his
experience the soldiers preferred that well-known comrades died beside
them, and it was more difficult that they fled in combat if those who they
abandoned were lifetime family and friends. Leonidas put his Spartans to
the front of the formation, as a spearhead. They would be the first to
engage.
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Ominously the Persians advanced and entered the gorge. The

Spartans sang the paean with religious solemnity. When the Persians
began raiding with terrifying shouting, the relentless meat grinder of the
Spartan phalanx began to operate silently. The Persians crashed into the
wall of shields with a deafening roar, waving their arms and finally
skewering into the Spartan spears. Imagine the sight of that.
The blood that had run, the orders at the top of lungs, the cries of
war and of pain, the cuts and stabbings, the reddened spears in and out
rhythmically as sinister spikes from the shield of chest-plates splashed
with blood, attacking accurately the weaknesses of poorly protected
enemy bodies; the shocks and bumps, the terrible wounds, the bodies of
the fallen and the Spartans maintaining calm and silence in the midst of
the confusion and the terrible din of battle; the Persians, brave but
ineffective, immolating themselves in a glorious feat. The Spartans
seemed to be everywhere, and there they were, inspiring the other Greeks
to imitate them, pointing out that victory was possible and stirring the
moral. By their conduct they were proving that their socialism of union
and sacrifice was clearly superior to any other political system, and that
they were better prepared to face the Iron Age.
Unlike Leonidas, Xerxes did not fight. Sitting on his throne of gold,
located in a suitable place, he watched with horror what was happening:
his troops were being slaughtered catastrophically. The Persians had
much lighter and ineffective armor than the heavy Greek cuirass, as the
type of Persian fight was based on mobility, speed, fluidity and flexibility
of large crowds, while the Greek was organized resistance, accuracy,
coordination, diamond hardness and willingness to stand together as one
compact rock before the onslaught of the ocean waves. Furthermore, the
Persian spears were shorter and less stout, and could not reach the
Spartans with ease. They fell by the hundreds, while the Spartans were
barely injured. The best Persian officers fell when, going by the head of
their troops, tried to inspire them and were wounded by Hellenic
weapons. When Leonidas ordered to relieve the Spartans, passing other
units into combat, the situation continued: the Persians fell massacred. It
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is said that three times Xerxes jumped from his throne to see what was
going on, perhaps as a football coach sees his team thrashed. Leonidas
would only say, “the Persians have many men, but no warrior.”
General Hidarnes removed the contingent of Kysios and Medes,

discovering a floor mangled with corpses. Then he made enter his
immortals in combat, convinced that they would change the course of
battle. Leonidas ordered his Spartans to be on the forefront again. The
immortals advanced impassively on the bodies of their fallen compatriots
and furiously rammed the phalanx. The Spartans suffered some
casualties, but their formation did not break. For their part, the
immortals were pierced by long spears and fell by the dozens, wounded
and dead. Many fell into the waters of the Gulf of Malis, where many, for
not knowing how to swim, or sunk by the weight of their weapons and
armor, were carried by ocean currents and drowned.
The Spartans implemented their more tested and complicated

tactics, demonstrating the perfect instruction they alone possessed. They
opened gaps where unsuspecting enemies penetrated, only to be shut
down and massacred by rapid spears poking from all sites. Other times
they simulated panic and retreated in disarray, after which the Persians
emboldened, pursued in disarray. But the Spartans, displaying their
mastery in close order, turned quickly returning to phalanx form, each
taking place at the last moment and terribly reaping the Persian ranks,
sowing the ground with corpses and watering it with their blood. So
passed a whole day. When evening came, the fighters retreated and had
their rest. It was considered bad luck fighting at night (it was more
difficult that the dead found their way to the afterlife). The Greeks were
exhausted but in high spirits. The Persians, on the other hand, were
fresher but their morale hit rock bottom. They must have wondered if
they were as bad or if it was the Greeks who were so good.
The next morning the fight resumed. Xerxes commanded fresh

Persians, hoping that maybe they made a dent in the exhausted Greek
defenders. Nothing was further from reality: wave after wave, the Greeks
massacred the enemy again. The terror began to spread among the
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Persians. Many times they tried to escape the Spartans, and the officers
lashed them with whips to force them to combat.
At that point, Xerxes had to be amazed and desperate at the same

time. Its fleet had failed to defeat the Greek fleet at Cape Artemision, and
he could not outflank Thermopylae by sea. Then came the betrayal, the
heroes’ curse. A local shepherd named Ephialtes asked to speak to Xerxes
and, in exchange for a hefty sum of money, he revealed the existence of
the road that skirted the ravine, in a process archetypally similar to what
happened many centuries later in the fortress of Montségur of the
Cathars. General Hidarnes, in command of the immortals, crossed the
road guided by Ephialtes. When he saw at the distance a few Greeks
ready for the fight, he hesitated and asked Ephialtes if they were Spartan.
He told him they were Phocis, and Hidarnes continued. Since then, the
die was cast: the Greeks were doomed. They were going to lose the battle
to death.
Leonidas, meanwhile, received messengers (probably repentant

Thessalians fighting under the Persians) who informed him how they
would be surrounded by the enemy. The Greeks took counsel
immediately. Leonidas knew already that he would lose the battle. He
ordered all the Greeks to retire except his Spartans and the Thebans. The
Thespians, led by Demophilus, decided to remain on their own will, and
so they did, covering their small town with glory. When only Spartans,
Thebans and Thespians remained (1,400 men at first, less than the
casualties suffered during the fighting), the troops breakfasted. Leonidas
told his men: “This is our last meal among the living. Prepare well
friends, because tonight we will dine in Hades!”
The Greeks formed, this time together, the phalanx. Before them, the
vast army; and the immortals to their rear. Instead of attacking the
immortals to perhaps defeat them and fight their way to the withdrawal
(which would be useless because it would open the Greek doors to the
Persians), Leonidas ordered to attack the bulk of the Persian army, in a
magnificent display of heroism and courage, with the goal of maintaining
the fight for as long as possible and give time to Greece to prepare. They
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knew they were going to die in any case, so they chose to die heroically,
showing an immense greatness. The Greeks were aware that this was no
longer a resistance with hope, but a struggle of sacrifice in which the goal
was a passionate and furious rush into the arms of glory; inflicting the
enemy the greater damage in the process and delaying the invasion.
In the middle of combat, and having killed countless Persians,

Leonidas fell. Around his body, a hellish turmoil was formed while
Greeks and Persians fought for its possession. Several times he fell into
enemy hands and several times he was recovered by the Greeks.
Eventually the body was secured by the Spartans that, constantly
fighting, retreated to the Phocaean wall.
At one point, the Thebans separated from the bulk of the Greek
phalanx. For long instants they fought valiantly, but in the end,
exhausted, crazed and looking lost, threw their weapons and spread their
hands in supplication to surrender to the Persians who, in the adrenaline
rush, even killed a few more. The rest of Thebes was captured. After the
battle, the Persians would mark them on the forehead with hot irons and
sell them as slaves. What helped them to surrender? What did they get?
Life? A life of slavery and humiliation? Would it not have been better and
more dignified to die in battle, fighting to the end?
The Spartans and Thespians, meanwhile, continued to struggle

beside the Phocaean wall. Under pressure and shock loads the wall
collapsed, crushing warriors of the two armies. Fighting continued, deaf
and ruthless. Many fell exhausted and could not raise again. Others died
pierced by the enemy metal. When finally Hidarnes appeared in front of
the immortals, the few Greeks who remained, almost all Spartans,
climbed a small hill to defend themselves more easily. They put their
backs against a wall to avoid being completely unprotected. There were
less than a hundred Greeks against at least 100,000 Persians (some say
150,000 and others speak of figures far higher). There, every Greek was
facing more than a thousand Persians.
The time of final resistance witnessed the most flaming heroism of
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history. The last fight on the hill of Thermopylae has been the inspiration
for countless works of art over centuries. Probably only Spartans were
left. Almost all of them were wounded and bleeding from several wounds.
Their spears were broken and their shields shattered, so they resorted to
the sword. Those who were unarmed after breaking or losing the sword
used rocks to hit the enemy, or fanatically rushed upon him to kill him
with their hands or teeth, fist, choking, breaking, hitting, crunching,
tearing and biting with superhuman ferocity, in a vicious and bloody
melee. Were not these men possessed by the legendary holy wrath, that
of the berserkers and the inspired warriors? They well could have asked:
“Why do you fight, if you will lose? You are shattered, on the brink of
death and closer to the other world than to Earth. Why do ye keep
fighting?” But those were improper thoughts for heroes. Their behavior
far exceeded anything in this world. Reason had been trampled under the
feet of the Hellenic will, which squeezed at the maximum the forces from
those heroes. It was a rage that came from the above. It was blind
fanaticism; an invincible, visceral, red and instinctive feeling. It was a
fight to the end.
The Persians failed to reduce those brave and, totally demoralized,

retreated. Then their archers advanced, and loosed successive rains of
arrows that finished off the resistant. A massive, imperial army of
hundreds of thousands fighting dozens (probably around a hundred) of
crazed Greeks, and still they had to beat them from afar because in melee
they could never win!
When the last Spartan—exhausted, delirious and bleeding, with his

mind set on his wife, his children, his country and the sky—fell riddled
with arrows shot from a distance, the battle of Thermopylae ended. The
Greeks had lost and the Persians won. The fallen had furiously slain
themselves to the last man, gentlemanly consummating their oath of
honor and eternal fidelity and ascended the steps of immortal glory. In a
single battle those fallen men achieved a higher luminance than what a
thousand priests and philosophers have achieved in lifetimes of
dedication.
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To imagine the fear that this slaughter of Persians injected into the
heart of Xerxes, suffice it to say that he ordered the corpse of Leonidas to
be beheaded and crucified. (Similarly, William the Conqueror viciously
ordered to mutilate the body of King Harold after the Battle of Hastings
against the Anglo-Saxons, who also defended themselves at a high point).
This is much more revealing than it seems, since the Persians had the
tradition to honor a brave, dead enemy. But Leonidas had shown him
something too far above his respect, something terrifying that turned
upside down all he took for granted and knew about the Great West.
Other Greek corpses were thrown into a mass grave. Xerxes asked, beside
himself in his trauma, if in Greece there were more men like those 300
Spartans. We can well imagine what he felt when he was informed that
there were 8,000 Spartiates in Sparta, brave and trained as the 300
fallen.
Let us now do a little count of the battle of Thermopylae: 7,000

Greeks against (say) 250,000 Persians. The Greek side had 4,000 dead,
including Leonidas, his 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians. But the Persian
side had no more and no less than 20,000 people dead, including two
brothers of Xerxes: Abrocomes and Hyperanthes. That is, an army thirty
times smaller than the enemy inflicts losses five times greater than what
themselves suffered. Proportionally this means a triumph of 150 to 1.
Comment is superfluous, although we know that, after all, the cold
numerical figures understand nothing of heroism and will.
What happened after the battle? Was the sacrifice in vain? What did
the fallen get? Buying time for the naval fleet and the Greek counter-
offensive. The Persians continued their march to Athens, finding it empty
because its inhabitants had been evacuated during the fighting at
Thermopylae. The Persians sacked and burned what they could. In the
battle of Salamis in the same year of 480 BCE, the Greek fleet defeated
the Persian in glorious combat. Xerxes had to retire with an important
part of his army, for without the fleet, logistics and supply were
precarious. He, therefore, left 80,000 Persians (some say 300,000)
under the command of his brother, General Mardonius, to continue with
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the campaign.
A few months later, at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE, 5,000

Spartans along with their allies, under the leadership of King Pausanias
of Sparta, decisively defeated the Persians and General Mardonius fell in
combat. Persia was defeated. Greece won the Second Greco-Persian War.
The sacrifice of Thermopylae, therefore, was not in vain.
The poet Simonides wrote a poem in honor of the fallen Spartans at

Plataea. Below, an elegiac couplet:
O Stranger, send the news home to the people of Sparta that here
we are laid to rest:
the commands they gave us have been obeyed.
What was the catastrophic possibility that Leonidas prevented? Had

he withdrawn from the fight, the Persian cavalry would have attacked in
mass and in the open, closing from behind and from the sides. Persia
would have conquered all of Greece and probably a significant portion of
Eastern Europe; perhaps even beyond the Balkans and the Danube. (At
that time there was no Vienna that would stop it.) This would have been a
disaster for all posterity of ethnic Europeans.
Before parting for the fight, Queen Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, asked:
“What should I do if you don’t come back?” The short answer was:
“Marry one worth of me and have strong sons to serve Sparta.” In the
perpetuation of the race there is no acceptable pause. The road is
inexorable and the mystery of the blood is transmitted to the new heirs.
The Battle of Thermopylae was archetypal. Leonidas (a Heracleid

descendant, ancestor of the Spartan kings) fell on the spot where,
according to tradition, Heracles had rushed to the waters to calm his
inner fire. There a statue was placed of a lion (an animal whose skin
Heracles put on and contained in it the same name of Leonidas). There is
a simple inscription on a plate, “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
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Subsequent history of Sparta
SUBSEQUENT HISTORY OF SPARTA

A society in which corruption takes a hold is blamed for
effeminacy: for the appreciation of war, and the delight in war,
perceptibly diminish in such a society, and the conveniences of life
are now just as eagerly sought after as were military and
gymnastic honours formerly.
—Nietzsche, The Joyful Science
All Spartan education was considered admirable by the peoples around

Sparta, who greatly respected its courageous neighbor though sometimes
as a foe. Plato himself, when he wrote his Republic refers to State
measures which seem directly taken from the Spartan laws, because
those laws inspired him and were also admired by Aristotle—with some
reservation as to the supposedly totalitarian and tyrannical Ephorate.
(However, at the time of Aristotle Sparta was no longer the same.) In a
time when the Greek city-states were already in decline, voices were
raised calling for the adoption of the Spartan model. They were the
fascist of the age. Anyway, Spartan laws provided a stability that the
other Hellene States never knew.
In the sixth century BCE, Sparta launched new conquests over the
neighboring villages. About the attack on Tegea, Herodotus said that one
of the reasons was that the Spartans sought the mythological bones of
Orestes (son of the legendary King Agamemnon, leader of all Greeks in
the Trojan War), considered one of the distant ancestors of the Spartan
village. The Pythia of Delphi promised victory to the Spartans if they
found the bones. And sure enough, they found them and won. They
found no normal bones, but a skeleton of immense size, like the giant
heroes alluded to by Homer.
In the aforementioned case of Tegea, the Spartans were bold not to
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annex it but establish a treaty, by which Tegea was to provide soldiers,

weapons and other equipment, and teamed with Sparta to follow it in all
its foreign policy strategies. In return, Tegea could remain independent.
By similar policies, Sparta won the states around the Peloponnese,
eventually including Argos, Arcadia and Corinth to the point that, after
the invasion of the Persians in 490 BCE, Sparta was the greatest Hellenic
power, well above Athens.
According to Herodotus, at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE 5,000

Spartans fought with 5,000 perioeci and 35,000 helots. Only the
Spartans were consummate warriors, while others were forced to take up
arms, and the huge number of helots (completely lacking in military
training) were reduced to cannon fodder. In the period of greatest
population, Sparta had 200,000 helots and 9,000 Spartan families. In
480 BCE there were a total of just fewer than 8,000 mobilized Spartan
hoplites.
The Greek poet Aeschylus (525-456 BCE) put into the mouth of the
mother of Xerxes: “I seem to see two virgins superbly dressed. One richly
dressed in the fashion of the Persians; the other, after the manner of the
Dorians. The majesty of both surpass the other women. Both a flawless
beauty and of the same race” (The Persians). With this we see that even
at that time there were individuals who were aware of the absurdity of
these enmities in people of the same origin.
In 464 BCE a major earthquake hit Sparta that destroyed the

gymnasium while the ephebes, the cream of the Spartan youth, were
exercising, killing many of them. Diodorus Siculus exaggerated that
about 20,000 Spartans died, as Plutarch did when saying that only five
houses were left standing. However, the damage had to be large, and this
tragedy helped the helots who, taking advantage of the disorder that the
void created, initiated another revolt confident in their overwhelming
numerical superiority over the Spartans. After the Messenian helots
rebelled, the Laconian helots joined and even two perioeci communities:
Thouria (in Messenia) and Ethea (in Laconia). Thus began the Third
Messenian War, also known as the Mount Ithome rebellion.
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The open rebellion was crushed by the Spartans effectively and

without the slightest mercy. The spoils of the revolt were removed to
Mount Ithome from which, under the Spartan siege, the Messenians were
engaged for five years in a guerrilla war against the Spartans: also
resorting to guerrilla tactics by using their fanatic “puppies” in selective
hunting activities, repression and punishment. The Athenians sent to
Sparta a military contingent of four thousand men led by the patriot and
pro-Spartan Cimon to help them but the Spartans rejected the help, and
the contingent returned aggravated to Athens in what is known as “the
Ithome insult.”
After these five years, the Spartans, moved by a Delphic oracle,

which advised to let go “the supplicants of Zeus Itometa,” let them escape
the Peloponnese. The Spartan government further strengthened
afterwards its severity toward those helots, while Athens endorsed a
military pact with the fugitives, recognizing them not as helots but as
representatives of a legitimate Messenian State under military
occupation.
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The twilight of Sparta
THE TWILIGHT OF SPARTA

Should anyone ask me whether I think that the laws of Lycurgus
still remain unchanged at this day, I certainly could not say that
with any confidence whatever.
For I know that formerly the Lacedaemonians preferred to live

together at home with moderate fortunes rather than expose
themselves to the corrupting influences of flattery as governors of
dependent states.
And I know too that in former days they were afraid to be found
in possession of gold; whereas nowadays there are some who
even boast of their possessions.
There were expulsions of aliens in the former days, and to live

abroad was illegal; and I have no doubt that the purpose of these
regulations was to keep the citizens from being demoralized by
contact with foreigners; and now I have no doubt that the fixed
ambition of those who are thought to be first among them is to live
to their dying day as governors in a foreign land.
There was a time when they would fain be worthy of leadership;

but now they strive far more earnestly to exercise rule than to be
worthy of it.
Therefore in times past the Greeks would come to Lacedaemon

and beg her to lead them against reputed wrongdoers; but now
many are calling on one another to prevent a revival of
Lacedaemonian supremacy.
—Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians
The rivalry between Sparta and Athens eventually culminated in the

Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). This war had a certain spiritual-
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ideological character: the Athenians saw Sparta as a state of brutality,

oppression of the individual and uncompromising stiffness; while, for the
Spartans, Athens was a hotbed of decadence and effeminacy that
threatened to contaminate all Hellas. In 415 BCE, Spartan emissaries
came to the sanctuary of Delphi. The oracle gave them a grim omen: soon
the Spartans would see the walls of their worst enemy reduced to rubble,
but they themselves would soon succumb to a bitter defeat. This was
perhaps the first warning about the coming decline of Sparta.
Lysander, head of the Spartan fleet, effectively defeated the Athenian

Alcibiades in 404 BCE, and awarded the victory to his homeland. After
long and painful years of siege, hardships, and battles against Athens,
when finally Sparta triumphed Lysander simply wrote in his memoirs, in
another sign of brevity: “Athens has fallen.” Lysander was a mothax
(bastard or mestizo), for his father was a Spartan and his mother a helot.
However, during his childhood, he was accepted for some reason in the
brutal training system of the Agoge. Lysander was, however, a soldier
turned politician and conspirator, and stroked ideas about a new
revolution in Spartan laws. The mere fact that an individual like
Lysander had reached such a high position implied that something was
starting to smell rotten in Sparta.
The war resulted in the ruin of Athens, consolidating the Spartan

hegemony. That same year 404 BCE the walls of Athens were demolished
to the sound of Spartan fifes, as predicted in Delphi, and the government
of Athens was taken by “the thirty tyrants.” But Spartan supremacy
would be short because it had been achieved at the sacrifice of the best
Spartan blood and, as has been said, dark forebodings hovered over the
city. Their numbers dwindled. The hardness of the Spartans increasingly
produced hatred by the subjected people, which multiplied devilishly.
Sparta was aging.
On the other hand, Sparta was usually very jealous about its
citizenship laws (to be the son of a Spartan father and mother, and going
through eugenics, instruction and admission to the Army Syssitias), so
that with the advent of crossbreeding and bloody wars, in which the best
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Spartans fell, the number of real Spartiates was reduced from 10,000
during its apogee to just over a thousand, although at least those few
Spartans remained just like their ancestors. They’d chosen to be, at all
costs, a select few at the top, dominating an inferior majority and
remaining loyal to the laws of Lycurgus until the end of their national
agony. As a select group, they were obstinate in resisting and refused to
make concessions or share privileges, remaining increasingly proud as
their numbers were declining more and more. All this demographic
policy contrasted, then, with the Athenian: which artificially swelled the
numbers of its population (Athens had about five times the population of
Sparta) by non-white immigration, uncontrolled reproduction and lack of
eugenics.
This resulted in dirty and dingy slums and narrow winding streets,
where dark slaves accumulated and infections, rats and pests spread. The
defeat of Athens also motivated the circulating of riches as trophies to
Sparta. Plutarch wrote, “gold and silver money first flowed into Sparta,
and with money, greed and a desire for wealth prevailed through the
agency of Lysander, who, though incorruptible himself, filled his country
with the love of riches and with luxury, by bringing home gold and silver
from the war, and thus subverting the laws of Lycurgus.”
In 398 BCE, King Agesilaus ascended to the twin throne of Sparta. A

year later, another evil omen happened. While a priest carried out a
sacrifice, horrified, he glimpsed a nefarious, archetypal sign during the
ritual and announced with great alarm that Sparta was on the lookout for
its enemies. At that moment, according to the old man, Sparta was
seriously threatened. In view of the prostration of external enemies, the
omen was probably not taken with the seriousness it deserved. Few
would suspect that the omen was referring to the internal enemies of
Sparta.
Agesilaus discovered a year later, in 397 BCE, a conspiracy hatched

by Lysander against the laws of Lycurgus. In this conspiracy an
individual named Cinadon played an important role. He was part of the
hypomeiones or “inferior” Spartan citizens degraded for cowardice in
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battle; for failing to provide the stipulated rations of the Syssitia, or for
not having being admitted to any Syssitia due to any dishonorable
reasons. The point of this conspiracy is that it seemed to involve all those
who were not authentic Spartans, i.e., helots, perioeci, and the degraded
Spartans—all of which, according to the same Cinadon, wanted to “eat
raw” the elite of the real Spartans. Having made their confessions,
Cinadon and his clique of conspirators were driven through the city of
Sparta to spearhead and under the harassment of the whips. After being
carried to Kaiada they were executed and thrown into the pit.
Agesilaus was accused of breaking an old Lycurgus law prohibiting

to make war for a long time to the same enemy so that he could not learn
how to defend himself, as Agesilaus’ incursions into Boeotia practically
taught the Thebans to fight. In 382 BCE Sparta took Thebes, but this
victory was cursed as Sparta had decayed and the Thebans were being
strengthened. Four years later, the Thebans succeeded in expelling the
Spartans in the first political sign that Sparta was decaying. Years later,
7,000 highly motivated Thebans under the charismatic leader
Epaminondas rose against Sparta and defeated them at the Battle of
Leuctra in 371 BCE. In that battle only 1,200 Spartans fought: all that
remained of them. Four hundred of them died. It was said that when the
Theban soldiers entered in Sparta during the street fighting that
followed, and they were asking, “Where are the Spartans?” and an old
man answered, “There are not anymore, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
After the invasion, the intelligent Thebans stroke another huge blow
to the power of Sparta: they freed the helots. The city of Messenia, in a
record time of only seventy-four days, was surrounded by a wall and the
Ithome Fortress rebuilt and converted in an acropolis, symbolizing its
emancipation from the Spartan yoke: an emancipation they sought to
preserve at all costs.
The Spartans had fallen, but the Thebans had kept their blood and
vitality pure. They had an elite unit called the sacred gang. Throughout
Greece, Theban women (described by Dicaearchus as blondes) were
already considered, above the Spartan, the most beautiful of Hellas. The
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Thebans descended from Thessalian invaders: magnificent horsemen

that arrived to Greece at the time of the great invasions. After being
expelled from the Peloponnese by the Dorians, they established their
capital, Thebes, in Boeotia. The Battle of Leuctra finally consummated
the Thessalians’ revenge against the Dorians.
Since 640 BCE no army had ever managed to subdue Sparta. The
Spartan power was over. Its laws of iron and stone—wisely enacted and
recorded in blood and fire—could not eternally restrain racial
miscegenation while in disastrous wars died the best biological
specimens and the spiritual elite. There was betrayal, disloyalty, memory
loss, and a fall. From here, the history of Sparta is shameful, desperate,
sad and tragic. One almost feels embarrassed before her in contrast to
her previous heroism. It could be said it was humiliating for their heirs,
but we must add that many of them were no longer heirs of Dorian
Sparta since it no longer ran in their bodies the most important heritage:
pure Dorian blood.
The racial miscegenation and the fratricidal war with Athens had
greatly weakened many Greek city-states, so that they fell prey to the
Indo-European new star: the Macedonians of Philip II (382-336 BCE), a
Greek village that had remained on the periphery of Greece living in
semi-barbarian state, retaining the hardness of its origins and purity of
blood. Using the Thessaly League, the Macedonians began to penetrate
gradually in Greece. In 367 BCE the Aetolian League was formed. In 339
BCE the Macedonians had already mastered Hellas, including Sparta.
The son of Philip II, the famous Alexander the Great, conquered the
greatest empire ever known, from Greece to India, and from the
Caucasus to Egypt.
In 330 BCE, King Agis III of Sparta attacked Antipater, Alexander’s

lieutenant, but was defeated and killed at the battle of Megalopolis.
During the Lamian War, after the death of Alexander the Great in 323
BCE, Sparta was too weak even to participate.
During the fourth century BCE there was a reform by an Epitadeus,
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an ambitious ephor that, for disagreements with his own son, drafted a
law that all citizens could give their inheritance to whom they pleased.
This had huge influence on the distribution of land plots. However, the
subsequent ruin of Sparta was not the result of this law; the wording of it
was the result of a silent decline of mind and body, materially manifested
in blood contamination, the disintegration of the noble families and the
evils resulting from this.
During this decadent time of miscegenation and corruption,

women’s freedom turned against Sparta. Traditionally being owners and
managers of the farm and home, they became greedy and selfish. The
materialism that invaded Sparta from Athens took root in women with
ease. They forgot their athletic naturalness; the physical exertion, and
their role as severe mothers; they also forgot the gravity of the sacred
wife and to inspire hope and contemplation. Instead they embraced
luxury, comfort and embellishments. Foolishly, during the decay Spartan
women came to hoard most of the wealth of Sparta.
By the end of the fourth century BCE Sparta was surrounded by

defensive walls, breaking her tradition and revealing the world that had
lost confidence in herself.
Agis of Sparta (reigned between 244-241 BCE) attempted to

reinstate the laws of Lycurgus. He had been educated in patriotism and
dreamed in restoring the greatness of his country. By then, lots of land
were unevenly distributed and badly exploited, and he wanted to make it
more equitable. Agis postponed land redistribution to join the Achaean
League Aratus of Sicyon, challenging the growing power of the
Macedonians. In 243 BCE, the Achaean League defeated the Macedonian
garrison in Corinth, resulting in a brief expansion of the league. But
during the king’s absence, resistance to his reforms was implemented by
his co-ruler, King Leonidas II. This traitor king, unworthy of his name,
was the perfect example of Spartan decline: he married a Persian woman
and liked to keep in his court an oriental-style luxury which would have
caused his death when Sparta was in its prime. As Agis returned he was
arrested by the ephors who, now completely corrupted, condemned him
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to death. Agis was thus the first king of Sparta to be executed by the
government.
In 230 BCE only 700 Spartans were left: divided, confused and
aimless. The differentiation of castes and racial barriers had collapsed.
The plots of land were in the hands of women who managed them
greedily, and of helots who owned their own land. Plutarch wrote:
Thus there were left of the old Spartan families not more than
seven hundred, and of these there were perhaps a hundred
who possessed land and allotment; while the ordinary throng,
without resources and without civic rights, lived in enforced
idleness, showing no zeal or energy in warding off foreign
wars, but ever watching for some opportunity to subvert and
change affairs at home.
Cleomenes III of Sparta (reigned 235-219 BCE) attempted to make

another return to the laws of Lycurgus. His goal was to create a group of
Spartans that restituted the ancient power of the city. After a series of
encouraging alliances with Tegea and the recovery of Manatee from the
Arcadians, Sparta seemed to be reborn as opposed to the Achaean
League. Spartan austerity was reestablished as well as the team meals,
and defeated the Achaean League in 228 BCE, on the banks of the river
Lyceum. And in 227 BCE Sparta defeated it again near Leuctra. The
victorious Cleomenes returned to Sparta covered with prestige. He
executed the corrupt ephors and abolished the institution of the
Ephorate. Sparta continued to conquer and triumph: it annexed Manatee
and in 226 BCE defeated the Achaean League again in the Battle of
Hecatombaeon. This time, supported by Egypt, Sparta was literally re-
conquering the Peloponnese.
The leaders of the Achaean League, frightened by the revival of the

legendary Spartan power, decided to end its anti-Macedonian policy and
cynically requested the Macedonians’ help to deter the new Spartans. So
Aratus of Sicyon sought help from his supposed enemy, the king
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Antigonus III of Macedonia, offering control of Corinth. The Aetolian

League and the Macedonian League, united, gathered an army of 30,000
men who beat the 10,000 Spartans and their allies in the Battle of
Sellasia of 222 BCE. There definitely Spartan power was extinguished;
the new Spartans fell, their walls demolished, and Cleomenes exiled to
Alexandria. After trying from there a coup with the help of Egypt, he died
in 220 BCE. With him the royal Heracled lineage disappeared.
Both Agis IV and Cleomenes III are tragic figures: men of quality
who were born too late, representing the dying voice of the Spartiate
archetype during the sinister sunset. However, these kings failed to
understand the real cause of Sparta’s collapse: the luxuries of civilization
and dissolution of the originating elements of Dorian blood that built
Sparta.
In 208 BCE, Nabis, later known as “Tyrant of Sparta,” ascended the

throne. Since the double lineage of the Heracletes had disappeared with
the king Cleomenes III, he made himself the sole king of Sparta, building
again the defensive walls that surrounded Sparta and trying to revitalize
the reforms attempted by Agis IV and Cleomenes III. Nabis introduced,
with the help of the Aetolian League, a kind of democracy in Sparta. This
was his biggest mistake: it gave freedom to many helots, who would soon
mix their blood with the Spartans. The mothakes (mestizos) began to
influence the very Spartan national body, and neodamodeis or “new
citizens” emerged.
In 205 BCE Sparta allied with Rome in the hope of removing the
Macedonians. But in 197 BCE Rome turned against Sparta, establishing
an alliance with other Greek states. The Achaean League of 192 BCE
forced Sparta to join her to monitor its movements, but when Nabis felt
that the League had overreached its affairs he seceded. Philopoemen led
the Achaean army that burst in Sparta and executed the anti-Achaean
leaders, including Nabis, knocking again Sparta’s walls; freeing the
slaves, and abolishing the Agoge. Everything that in this period the
Achaeans did against Sparta was an expression of the unconscious terror
they felt about the possible resurrection of Sparta’s power and it was
- 140 -
then, when Sparta was weak, that they wanted to finish it off to prevent
any future outbreaks.
In 146 BCE Sparta was conquered by the Roman legions. Under

Roman rule, some Spartan customs survived, but stripped from their
essence. The festival of Artemis became a grotesque ceremony of simply
whipping children in public, sometimes to the death. In the tranquility of
the Pax Romana Sparta was devoted to these abhorrent practices, which
attracted large numbers of morbid tourists around the Mediterranean.
In 267 CE Sparta was sacked by the Heruli Germanic people—the

same people who would depose the last Roman emperor of the West two
centuries later. The Germans were the new star of Europe, and they
would be for many centuries. Their uncontaminated will to power
together with their barbaric mentality drove them to conquer and
dominate. During this time they were rushing into a Roman Empire
already decadent and beyond recognition, in which Christianity was
inevitably undermining the sacred pillars of the pagan, militarist and
patriarchal society that the Romans once had.
After the Roman disaster against the Goths at the Battle of

Hadrianople (378 CE), the Spartan phalanx defeated a band of
marauding Germans in a flash of strength. But in 396 CE Sparta was
destroyed by the Visigoths of King Alaric I, who ended up being in charge
of administering the coup de grace to an already unrecognizable Roman
Empire.
Near the ruins of Sparta it was built the town of Mistras. The
Romans, after conquering Southeast Europe, built on Mistras a new city
they called Lacedaemonia, as Sparta was called before. According to
Byzantine sources, in the 10th century large areas of the territory of
Laconia were still pagan.
Today Sparta is a set of simple, rough and not showy ruins. In the
words of Thucydides:
Suppose the city of Sparta to be deserted, and nothing left but
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the temples and the ground-plan. Distant ages would be very

unwilling to believe that the power of the Lacedaemonians was
at all equal to their fame… Whereas, if the same fate befell the
Athenians, the ruins of Athens would strike the eye, and we
should infer their power to have been twice as great as it really
is.
- 142 -
The lesson of Sparta
THE LESSON OF SPARTA

“I think that civilization tends more to refine vice than perfecting
virtue.”
—Edmond Thiaudière
A nation as exceptional as Sparta, which ravaged its enemies in an era

when man was infinitely harder than now; a nation that was feared in “an
age that everything grinds and splashes of blood” had an exceptional
mission: to point out a path to us, the children of the West and therefore
heirs of Sparta. That was the purpose of Lycurgus, and the Delphic Sibyl
grasped it as soon as she saw these peoples, sanctifying their mission. But
Sparta also signaled to us the only weakness of such a civilization, so that
its decline may be a lesson for us, so that the great pain of Spartan
discipline and military asceticism had not been in vain.
What happened to Sparta has happened to every civilization: it

succumbed to the multiracial curse, the gold of the traders, the
corruption of women, the softness of men, the relaxation, the luxuries
and the fratricidal wars; although the laws of Lycurgus extended their
glory and agony. The best and bravest men in Greece were finished. Then
its body was trampled by purer and more vigorous and youthful peoples.
But what is the moral of the story? That the awakening of European
humanity, as once the awakening of Sparta, can occur only after the
advent of a terrible racial trauma that acts as an initiation of the sort of a
“mystical death.” Who will give Europe the dreaded initiation?
Sparta also teaches us something that we can not afford, something

we should avoid at all costs, that quality men die without leaving
abundant offspring: pure, protected and cultivated; procreated with
congeners of identical racial quality. To cultivate the best blood is the
- 143 -
solution. Having a garden perfectly ordered and distributed is the

solution. And Sparta was successful for a long time, but ended up failing.
And it fell gnawed at its roots from the inside.
If today, therefore, we had to ask which country is more like Sparta

in terms of its strategic location and methods, only Israel could give an
answer. Jewry has realized that losing their head and being seduced by
the confidence that overwhelms the victor is the moment of greatest
danger, and therefore has established something so outrageous and
incomprehensible at first glance as the State of Israel. Despite having
conquered the West, thanks to Israel Jewry can even afford to be in an
environment of danger and war. There, the enemy lies inside and
constantly threatens to attack. There, only the oppression of the
Palestinians and keeping themselves in perpetual guard ensures their
safety and mentalizing to avoid decay. There they have a fanatical,
hysterical, heavily armed and militarized people, surrounded by hostile
neighbors that increase even more their paranoia, their racism, their self-
defense mentality and eagerness to compensate, through quality, their
numerical inferiority: feeding a feeling to be alone with the danger—an
absolutely false feeling as they have on their feet the media of almost all
the West.
Compared to the barbarism prevailing in the slums and shanty

towns of the Third World; the Asian corporate organizations in the East,
the troglodyte immigrants on the streets of the West, and the barbaric
state consolidated in the State of Israel, the West appears to be extremely
soft, old, head down, sissy, with no instincts or spine, and doomed.
Today, the West transits its most vulnerable stage and this condition is
increasing at accelerated pace. Our civilization will not be saved if it
cannot awaken its primal instincts.
The Spartans were heirs of an archetype: the archetype of the

European military state, of the ranks of disciplined troops; of pride,
honor, austerity and sacrifice. The archetype, as we have said, would be
inherited by others throughout history: such as the Romans, the
Templars, the Spanish, the English and the Germans. The Spartans thus
- 144 -
formed part of the lineage of giants of the West and of human genius. In
their case, they had the privilege of being no more or less than a sole and
united people.
Let us compare today’s Europeans with the Spartans. We feel panic

in finding such physical, mental and spiritual degeneration; such
stultification. European man, who used to be the hardest and most
courageous of Earth, has become a weakling rag and degenerated
biologically as a result of comfort. His mind is weak; his spirit fragile, and
on top of that he considers himself the summit of the creation. But that
man, just because of the blood he carries, has enormous potential.
The rules on which Sparta was seated were eternal and natural, as
valid today as yesterday, but today the dualistic mens sana in corpore
sano has been forgotten: the physical form has been abandoned
producing soft, puny and deformed monsters; and the mental poisoning
has produced similar abominations in the realm of the spirit. The
modern European knows no pain, no honor, no blood, no war, no
sacrifice, no camaraderie, no respect or combat; and thus he does not
know the ancient and gentle goddesses known as Illumination, Gloria or
Victoria.
All European revivals were inspired by the Greco-Roman or classical

European spirit, of which the Spartan archetype was the most
accomplished and refined expression. Sparta’s immutable laws remain as
valid today as yesterday, just waiting for someone to have the wisdom to
obey them.
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The survival of the Spartan archetype
THE SURVIVAL OF THE SPARTAN

ARCHETYPE
“Ye could well create the Overman. Not perhaps ye yourselves, my
brethren! But into fathers and forefathers of the Overman could
ye transform yourselves: and let that be your best creating!”
—Nietzche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
The Spartans were heirs of an archetype: the archetype of the European

military state, of the ranks of disciplined troops; of pride, honor,
austerity and sacrifice. The archetype, as we have said, would be
inherited by others throughout history: such as the Romans, the
Templars, the Spanish, the English and the Germans. The Spartans thus
formed part of the lineage of giants of the West and of human genius. In
their case, they had the privilege of being no more or less than a sole and
united people.
Let us compare today’s Europeans with the Spartans. We feel panic

in finding such physical, mental and spiritual degeneration; such
stultification. European man, who used to be the hardest and most
courageous of Earth, has become a weakling rag and degenerated
biologically as a result of comfort. His mind is weak; his spirit fragile, and
on top of that he considers himself the summit of the creation. But that
man, just because of the blood he carries, has enormous potential.
The rules on which Sparta was seated were eternal and natural, as
valid today as yesterday, but today the dualistic mens sana in corpore
sano has been forgotten: the physical form has been abandoned
producing soft, puny and deformed monsters; and the mental poisoning
has produced similar abominations in the realm of the spirit. The
- 146 -
The survival of the Spartan archetype
modern European knows no pain, no honor, no blood, no war, no

sacrifice, no camaraderie, no respect or combat; and thus he does not
know the ancient and gentle goddesses known as Illumination, Gloria or
Victoria.
All European revivals were inspired by the Greco-Roman or classical

European spirit, of which the Spartan archetype was the most
accomplished and refined expression. Sparta’s immutable laws remain as
valid today as yesterday, just waiting for someone to have the wisdom to
obey them.
- 147 -

Sparta and Its Law - Eduardo Velasco 2012

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Eduardo Velasco

Translated by César Tort

In this book we have gathered data from various sources, giving

Today our indoctrinating academics vaguely teach that Sparta was a

It is impossible to finish this introduction without reference to the

At first, most of Greece was inhabited by Mediterranean peoples that

Scope of the Minoan civilization.

According to Greek mythology, as the first peripheral Hellenes were

Hellenes to be ritually slaughtered (the legend of Theseus, Ariadne, the

The Achaeans settled in Greece, establishing themselves as the

The Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, around 1800-1400 BCE.

The Achaeans, finally, opened the way for the Mycenaean

As for the Mycenaean civilization of the Achaeans, it was also

During the Greek Middle Ages, in 1104 BCE, the Heracleidae

However, an Achaean counteroffensive held them back. Then, in a

The new stream of Indo-European blood, courtesy of the Dorians,

The original city of Sparta or Lacedaemon was not properly a city; it

Sparta, however, was surrounded by natural defenses, as it was

In ancient Hellas three Indo-European streams would end up as the

FIRST DEVELOPMENT OF SPARTA: THE

On the other hand, the neighboring kingdom of Messenia had the

Moreover, they would not cosmopolitanize, as usual with all trading

power of clearly continental type—opposed to the maritime Athenian

After some years, however, the Spartans decided to attack the

Three times he celebrated a Hecatomb sacrifice, a ritual only allowed

characterized by close order formations, barricading behind a shield wall

betrayed. In the fierce battle that followed it is said Aristomenes was

The Spartans conquered by spear and sword enough land to support

Unlike other Hellenic states, Sparta had chosen to be a continental

that is the only advantage of the unfortunate fratricidal wars, so typical of

LYCURGUS AND THE REVOLUTION

After quelling the second Messenian rebellion with great difficulty,

It is not known when Lycurgus lived. Some say he belongs to the

But the queen was an ambitious woman who wanted to continue

Meanwhile, Lycurgus as Regent was highly revered by the people,

Tales appeared in Sparta as a musician-poet, a kind of minstrel,

Lycurgus also traveled to Egypt, where he spent time studying the

The Spartan Aristocrates says that Lycurgus also traveled to Iberia,

and there was no executive power to punish offenders. Upright men

Lycurgus returned to Sparta and his first action was to bring

This modern reconstruction recreates how the sanctuary of Delphi must

With the blessing of the priestess, Lycurgus established the Spartan

By then Sparta was surrounded by hostile neighbors difficult to repel

Lycurgus did not exactly intend establishing a kind of democracy.

Lycurgus’ revolution was not entirely peaceful. The Spartan people

After the Spartan people swore the laws of Lycurgus, he decided to

ritual suicide has been practiced by many exceptional men whose

Another version relates that before leaving Delphi, Lycurgus made

For Sparta, Lycurgus was something of a precursor, a vanguard

Xenophon greatly admired Lycurgus saying that he “reached the

THE NEW SPARTA

The Spartans were militarized. All the people went on organizational

like an aristocracy than a democracy. Spengler described this type of

The caste organization in Sparta was tripartite: warriors, “bourgeois”

(1) The Spartiates (Greek: Σπαρτιάται, “Spartans”). The upper class

The custom of calling themselves “equal” is rooted in the collective

The Spartiates were the descendants of the old army of Dorian

(2) The Perioeci (or perioikoi) means peripheral, people around,

Helots mortally hated the arrogant Spartan nobility (Cinadon said

Helot numbers, according to the Greek historian Thucydides (460-

EUGENICS AND EARLY CHILDREARING

It can be said that the system of eugenics preceded even birth,

preparing them to support prolonged activity. We also know that red