The ideology of the Spartan is like this; kill. I can’t quite tell you why, but I can tell you this:


There’s a line one must cross eventually. It is not a straight line; it is as jagged and poor-looking as the ways we cross it.

In the times of ancient Sparta, war was not as it is today. Today, it is almost a video game: Fly a robot plane from the other side of the world and shoot missiles at terrorists on the screen.


In Sparta, boys, from age seven to twenty-one, were schooled in the Spartan method of training called the agoge. To some city-states, it seemed very nearly indoctrination; to the Athenians, it likely was looked on with both awe and horror.


The man Lycurgus, in 700 B.C., instituted a set of laws. For one, Sparta was separated into 9000 equal plots of land, leading the new name for Spartan to be ‘Spartiate’ or ‘Peer’. To prevent one from being unequal through wealth, Lycurgus remade the coinage - the cost of a loaf of bread was an iron piece which weighed thirty pounds. This was obviously ridiculous, so Spartans stopped from using money to dictate status and went with martial abilities.


Lycurgus believed the military life to be the only one right for a man, so the agoge was made to revolve around that. Boys were taught in the art of war; they were made to be so fit that only the best special forces soldier today might compare to a champion Spartan in terms of hardiness, fitness, and attitude. So prevalent was that attitude in reformed Sparta that only two occupations; a soldier, and a singer, the ability of which Spartans prized highly.


To build esprit de corps, no Spartans were permitted to eat with their families, rather eating in ‘common messes’ of fifteen of their compatriots.


And on the battlefield, no other military should think they had a good chance of defeating Spartans. They were raised from boys only to fight, because Lycurgus outlawed all other occupations. Spartans were even not allowed to partake in some parts of the Olympic Games because other Greeks thought their Spartan brethren to have unfair advantages.


And in that holy mill of murder, the Spartans were at home. When a man sees he is second to none in a certain skill, he will be intensely proud. Imagine how the Spartans felt. In Thermopylae, the Hot Gates, five thousand Greeks infamously held off millions of Persians. Three hundred Spartiates remained there when nearly all other Greeks retreated after they saw the battle was folly, and that three hundred finished probably what is the most famous battle in Western history. Tales of Spartan valor at the Hot Gates inspire works to this day, from movies such as 300 to epic novels like Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire.


And the Greeks contributed their parts. Herodotus, the father of history, wrote of how the Spartan Dienekes coolly responded to a Persian emissary that told his the Persian archers shot in volleys so numerous as to blot out the sun.


“Then we will fight in the shade.”


And the Greek poet Simonides wrote perhaps what is the most famous epitaph in history. Greek poetry often appealed to the reader; this particular one is written in the Spartan style that the word ‘Laconic’ comes from, asking the reader to tell Sparta that the three hundred has obeyed its orders unto death.


“Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

Would you, reader, dare to emulate the Spartans?