{"id":946,"date":"2024-12-18T00:26:50","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T00:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/?p=946"},"modified":"2024-12-19T18:14:21","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T18:14:21","slug":"the-spartan-secret-to-loving-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/the-spartan-secret-to-loving-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spartan Secret to Loving Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Helena P. Schrader is a scholar of ancient Sparta who has participated in international academic conferences and was a guest speaker in the modern City of Sparti’s “Sparta Live!” program. Her novels on ancient Sparta extrapolate from ancient sources to create a credible interpretation of Spartan society.They have won praise from leading academic experts on ancient Sparta and have been translated into Greek and Polish.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Find out more about Helena P. Schrader's Sparta novels at:<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAncient Sparta<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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The Spartan Secret to Loving Life<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Sparta\u2019s enemies allegedly joked that it was no wonder the Spartans were willing to die in battle — because no one would have liked to live the way they did. Aside from the fact that these commentators probably knew very little about the way Spartans actually lived, the assumption is that lack of luxury and the pervasive deprivation to which Spartans were condemned by their laws made them unhappy men.<\/p>

Yet Xenophon, a noted Laconophile who lived and campaigned with Spartans for decades, argued the other way around: that precisely because the Spartans learned to get along with very little, they were actually happier.<\/p>

Today, I end my posts on Ancient Sparta by examining the Spartan secret to loving life.<\/p>

Modern efforts to measure happiness have produced various indexes which prove that there is no direct correlation between wealth and happiness. Unscientifically, I would add that in my personal experience the Nigerians, surrounded by corruption, pollution and collapsing infrastructures, are much happier and have a greater\u00a0joie de vivre<\/i>\u00a0than do the Norwegians, who have\u00a0one of the highest standards of living and enjoy one of the most equitable and developed societies on earth.<\/p><\/div>

Without getting too deeply into the philosophical topic of what constitutes happiness, I would like to suggest that happiness has less to do with objective circumstances and more to do with a state of mind. We all know that whether a glass is described as half empty or half full depends on whether the observer is a pessimist or an optimist.\u00a0However, as my father pointed out: the optimist and the pessimist are both wrong \u2013 but the optimist is happier.<\/p><\/div>

When outsiders looked at Spartiate society and (based on what they knew) decided such a life wasn\u2019t worth living, they may indeed have accurately described how they would have felt if forced to live the way the Spartans did. However, they tell us nothing about the way the Spartans themselves felt. They are describing Spartan society as \u201chalf empty\u201d \u2013 but that is not necessarily the way the Spartans saw it. The historian has to look beyond the opinion of outsiders and search for hints about Spartans attitudes toward their society.<\/p><\/div>

Returning to the opening comment, I would argue that, in fact, men are very rarely willing to die for something they don\u2019t think work preserving. Troops notoriously break, run and surrender when they have lost faith in what they are fighting for. If Spartan rankers thought that their way of life wasn\u2019t worth living, then they would have welcomed defeat as a way of introducing revolution and constitutional reform. Indeed, if young Spartans thought the Spartan way of life was so abdominal that it was better to die than live as they were supposed to live, then idealistic young Spartans would have deserted to the Athenians in droves, helped defeat the oppressive regime they hated, and introduced Athenian-style democracy. In short, witty as the Athenian joke is \u2013 and it made me laugh out loud \u2013 it does not describe the Spartan frame of mind.<\/p><\/div>

So how do we come closer to the Spartan attitude toward life? What made Spartans willing to die for Sparta? Was it really just a mindless fear of showing fear? A fanatical devotion to a code of honor? Or was Xenophon on the right track when he suggested that the Spartans learned to enjoy life \u2013 and love it better \u2013 by learning self-control and restraint?<\/p><\/div>

As evidence of a certain, if not joie de vivre, at least contentment, I would like to first draw attention to those pieces of Spartan art that we have to date uncovered. Unlike the art of some warlike cultures (notably the Aztecs), Spartan art depicts many peaceful scenes: farm animals, lions and mythical beasts, bulls and horses (lots of horses!), riders with and without hunting dogs, chariots with horses and charioteers, girls running, married couples side-by-side, a king watching the correct weighing of goods for export, youths and maidens and hoplites, lots of hoplites. It is notable that the facial expressions on the human figures are uniformly benign. A convention certainly, but I would argue that a society that rarely smiled would not have conventionalized the smile as the expression in its art.<\/p><\/div>

As witness to Sparta\u2019s love of life I would also like to call Sparta\u2019s most famous philosopher, Chilon. According to a variety of ancient sources, Chilon was the origin of the quintessential laconic advice \u201cKnow Thyself\u201d \u2013 inscribed in the forecourt to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Maria Papadopoulos points out in her contribution to \u201cSparta: A city-state of Philosophers: Lycurgus in Montaigne\u2019s essais\u201d (Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History, Vol. 7, No. 1, July 2011), however, that this expression is a condensation of the longer command from Apollo to \u201cknow that you are not a God, know that you are mortal, know that the finitude called death is an irreducible component of life. Live accordingly.\u201d If Papadopoulos is correct, then Chilon\u2019s admonishment to \u201cknow thyself\u201d was not so much advice to know one\u2019s own abilities and limitations, but advice to live each day in anticipation of death.\u00a0 In short,\u00a0it\u00a0meant much the same thing as \u201cCarpe Diem,\u201d a phrase usually translated as \u201cuse each day.\u201d Arguably \u201cusing\u201d each day is not the same as enjoying each day, and yet as Papadopoulos goes on to note: \u201cThe ancient Spartans trained hard but they enjoyed themselves [too]: feasts, dancing and singing, creative imagination and satirical banter and a temple dedicated to the God of Laughter\u2026.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

Combined, these fragments of evidence suggest that the Spartans themselves did not find their lifestyle so burdensome and certainly not intolerable. The \u201cdeprivations\u201d and hard work that strangers found so depressing were in contrast of little importance in a society that learned to love life itself in full consciousness of its transience. A man who keeps in mind the alternative (death) loves even the simplest things in life. This, I postulate, was the secret of Spartan attitudes that can be interpreted as a very deep-seated\u00a0love of life.<\/p>

Spartans and their unique culture are depicted as realistically as possible in all my Spartan novels:<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Helena P. Schrader is a scholar of ancient Sparta who has participated in international academic conferences and was a guest speaker in the modern City of Sparti’s “Sparta Live!” program. Her novels on ancient Sparta extrapolate from ancient sources to create a credible interpretation of Spartan society.They have won praise from leading academic experts on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sparta-reconsidered"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=946"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1225,"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions\/1225"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo-websitedesigns.com\/helena\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}