“Come back with this or on it.”
—Spartan mother, handing his shield to her son as he marches off to war
This is probably the most famous quotation from a woman of ancient Sparta. It comes down to us from Plutarch’s Moralia, Sayings of the Spartan Women.
I want to start this series on the Warrior Archetype not with the male but with the female.
Not with Spartan warriors but with Spartan women.
Here are three other quick stories of Spartan mothers, also from Plutarch:
A messenger returned to Sparta from a battle. The women clustered around. To one, the messenger said, “Mother, I bring sad news: your son was killed facing the enemy.” The mother said, “He is my son.” “Your other son is alive and unhurt,” said the messenger, “He fled from the enemy.” The mother said, “He is not my son.”
A different messenger returned from a battle and was hailed by a Spartan mother: “How fares our country, herald?” The messenger burst into tears. “Mother, I pity you,” he said, “All five of your sons have been killed facing the enemy.” “You fool!” said the woman, “I did not ask of my sons. I asked whether Sparta was victorious!” “Indeed, Mother, our warriors have prevailed.” “Then I am happy,” said the mother, and she turned and walked home.
Two warriors, brothers, were fleeing from the enemy back toward the city. Their mother happened to be on the road and saw them running toward her. She lifted her skirts above her waist. “Where do you two think you’re running? Back here from whence you came?”
That’s a warrior culture. That’s the Warrior mentality par excellence, where the female, indeed the MOTHER (whom we always think of as nurturing, protective, willing to sacrifice everything to spare her child) is more hard-core than the male, more take-no-prisoners than the son.
We think of ancient Sparta as a male-dominated society, but the more I studied it, the more I saw that the women were the steel in the society’s spine. Just as one example, in the society’s latter days, when Sparta began to become corrupt and her commanders overseas took to taking bribes and conducting themselves with arrogance and cruelty toward the people under them, who called them out?
Their mothers.
We have a number of letters from Spartan mothers to their sons-colonels and generals overseas-where the mother says a version of the following:
Quit your thieving or quit breathing.
Spartan women enforced the warrior culture in a thousand ways. If a warrior was reported to have shown fear or acted with cowardice in the face of the enemy, when he returned to the city the young girls would surround him in the street singing anthems of ridicule. If he were engaged to be married, his fiancee’s family would break off the engagement. If he had sisters and they were engaged, the other families would sever all ties with them. In other words, the women made the warrior code stick.
What’s interesting is to contrast this to our own American culture. I’m not making any judgments here. I don’t mean to imply that one is “better” than the other. I’m just observing.
In contemporary America, we have an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, a Marine Corps … and these, just as in the ancient world, are warrior cultures and they share with societies of the past certain central virtues: the ideal of service, of placing the self below the good of the whole, camaraderie, fidelity to a code of honor, the willing embracing of adversity, the foundational desire for the rigorous, physically demanding life. And, of course, ultimately the commitment to lay down one’s life, if necessary, to defend the greater society.
But here’s one huge difference. Our U.S. military is a warrior society embedded not within a warrior culture, as with ancient Sparta, but within a culture of consumerism, a culture of individualism, even hyper-individualism, where the highest aspiration is a glorification of the self at the expense of the whole … and where such aspirations are often seconded and abetted by the wives and mothers of the individual male. Sparta was a warrior society embedded in a warrior culture, within a culture of collective unity. Central to this was the women of Sparta’s total buy-in and commitment. If a Spartan warrior experienced dread or reluctance to be a fighter and face the enemy and he dared articulate this to any woman, his wife, his mother, even his young daughter, he would find no sympathy. The greater warrior culture reinforced the warrior society within it.
In our society, the warrior ideals of service and self-sacrifice-embodied, let’s say, among law enforcement, first responders, firefighters, paramedics, and of course the military-is embedded in a greater society whose ideals are the exact opposite. The mainstream of American culture glorifies success, money, the pursuit of pleasure, luxury, and consumption. The ideal is to have a big house, drive a big car, advance your own individual interests even at the expense of others and of the environment or the well-being of future generations. Corporate CEOs make 400 times what workers do and no one sees anything wrong with this. Right or wrong, this much can be said for sure: this is not the warrior ideal of service and brotherhood, is it?
Again, I’m not making any judgments or arguing a case for an all-in warrior society. What I’m hoping to do with this video series is to examine the warrior mindset and track it through history to the current day. The reason I’m starting with the ancient Spartans, and particularly the Spartan women, is that I think that culture at its peak (along with, say, Samurai culture or Zulu or Masai culture) was probably the purest expression of the warrior ideal throughout an entire society.
So let’s start here, using Sparta (specifically Sparta at its moral apex with the battle of Thermopylae) as a base of comparison to the present, and move on through the succeeding episodes to other less pure–and in many ways, more challenging and interesting–expressions of the Warrior Archetype and the warrior ideal.
Oh, so well said; thank you. It’s the “We Culture” as opposed to the ‘Me Culture”, and in today’s America, the ‘Me’s’ are the vast majority. But not in this Marine Corps Family! S/f
This is so fascinating, thanks, Steven. To show that the Spartan women’s attitudes were not universal in the Greek culture, below is a poem by the femaile poet Sappho from Lesbos:
Some say an army of horsemen, others
Say foot soldiers, still others say a fleet
Is the finest thing on the dark earth
I say it is whatever one loves.
(translation by Cambridge University Press, 2014)
Not exactly the militaristic spirit of the Spartan women!
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As a Soldier, it started to become tedious to respond to the constant, “Thank you for your service” comments one would get at Starbucks. It wasn’t until I deployed and returned that I finally found the appropriate response.
“You’re welcome. Actually it is a pretty great gig, you might consider it yourself. The thanks goes to my wife. I was the one running off to the Super Bowl to play ball with my besties. My wife is the one who truly sacrificed, lifted my burdens that I dropped to chase the Flag.”
It was different each time, but it wasn’t until I came back from combat that I realized what true courage was. It was to love a man/woman through combat, holding a family together, and staying with that Soldier when the scar tissue of combat reared its ugly head.
Military spouses, 1st Responder spouses, and maybe to some extent semi-pro athlete/up and coming or b/c list artists & performer spouses are the true fountainheads of resilience and strength. Bills paid, children reared, pets fed, bandaids applied, packages sent, long stretches of ambiguity stoically shouldered alone. That is heroic.
Our culture, obviously, idolizes the wrong figures. Thank you Steven for reminding us who ‘wears the pants in the household’.
bsn
I took a photo to express what you are saying about the spouses. It was taken at Camp Pendleton on their practice grounds. The link is below. Thank you for sharing your heart!!
https://www.triplecord.com/Portfolio/TripleCord-Images/i-HVK7TZj/A
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I returned from battle that I understood what genuine essay tigers review fortitude was. It was to cherish a man/lady through battle, holding a family together.
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There is something really charming about candle-lights so they are definitely great decorations too! Thanks for the inspiration!
You describe today’s American culture. Go back to WWII era of American culture. Mother’s were like those Spartan women. That culture began to unravel starting in 1950s corporate push for consumerism. You’re also correct that the warrior spirit still exists in isolated pockets — even my subscribers at bazoocam agreed with you. The burden, however are the few having to defend the many. That’s also breaking down. WE warriors are getting exhausted by loathsome masses.
Spartan women were really mentally strong.
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