The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Clarendon Paperbacks)

760 Pages·1991·4.63 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Rawson

THE SPARTAN TRADITION IN
EUROPEAN THOUGHT
ELIZABETH RAWSON
CLARENDON PRESS OXFORD
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First issued as a Clarendon Paperback 1991
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Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn -iv-
FOREWORD TO PAPERBACK
EDITION
ELIZABETH RAWSON, the author of this book, died suddenly and
unexpectedly, at the age of 54, in Beijing, People's Republic of China, on 10
December 1988. A Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, she had been on
an exchange visit to the university of Nankai at Tianjin, where she had been
teaching Latin, Greek, and ancient history to Chinese graduate students. Her task
had been completed, to the great satisfaction of her hosts, and she was about to
return home when she was taken ill and died within a few hours.
Her readiness to interrupt the quiet tenor of her life at Oxford for the sake of
what proved to be a fatally exhausting journey was characteristic of her openness
to all new forms of cultural and aesthetic experience. Born into a cultivated
middle-class family and receiving at St Paul's and Somerville the best education
open to girls of her generation, Elizabeth Rawson combined classical learning
with a profound interest in European art, architecture, literature, and music in the
post-classical era. She was an excellent linguist and a person of refined tastes
and sensibility. In China she was an indefatigable sightseer and her letters to her
friends combine wry accounts of the hardships of Chinese life with warm
appreciation of the mountains, gardens, buildings, and scenery.
As a young woman she suffered a prolonged period of ill health and her
academic career took longer to get under way than might have been expected
after her brilliant undergraduate record. She was a Fellow of New Hall,
Cambridge, for twenty-one years and developed a warm affection for that
college. But she was not given a lectureship by Cambridge University and it was
only after her migration to Oxford in 1980 that she secured the recognition she
deserved. As Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Corpus she played a central
role in the life of the College. She was Master of Common Room, Assistant
Dean, Garden Master, and general arbiter elegantiae. Her kindly presence was
welcoming to guests and her cultivated fastidiousness exerted a civilizing
influence upon her colleagues and pupils alike.
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The Spartan Tradition in European Thought ( 1969) was the first of her books. It
was followed by Cicero: A portrait ( 1975) and her magnum opus, Intellectual
Life in the late Roman Republic ( 1985). In recognition of these achievements
she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1988. She also published an
extensive series of articles on different aspects of the middle and late Roman
Republic; these are to be reissued by the Clarendon Press. At the time of her
death she was planning a study of the Roman theatre.
The breadth of her cultural range is well reflected in The Spartan Tradition in
European Thought. It is based on an astonishing amount of first-hand reading of
more than two thousand years of European literature and history. As an essay in
intellectual history it anticipates the preoccupation with classical influences on
modern political thought which has been so prominent a theme in Anglo-
American historical writing during the last few decades. By tracing attitudes to
Sparta over many centuries it both illuminates many dimensions of European
thought and demonstrates the indispensability of a knowledge of the classical
past for the understanding of the present.
Elizabeth Rawson was a strikingly handsome woman with a dignified, rather
formal manner, a carefully modulated voice and, behind a courteous and friendly
exterior, a certain reserve and inhibition. Her writings occasionally betray what,
given her profound learning, may be regarded as undue scholarly caution. But
she could also be trenchant in judgement, for her sensibilities were always
combined with robust common sense. She was generous, tolerant, humorous,
realistic, and totally unsentimental. Her premature death is a sad blow to
classical scholarship. Her friends and colleagues will remember her as a wholly
exceptional person.
Corpus Christi College, Oxford KEITH THOMAS
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PREFACE
CLASSICAL scholars are aware of the long and remarkable tale of the
idealization: of Sparta in antiquity, and a good deal of work has been done on the
subject. But when I attempted to carry on the story, in outline, down to the
present day--for a lecture, and also for my own interest--I was surprised to find
that almost no part of it had been explicitly treated. Furthermore, such
recognition of Sparta's attractiveness in certain periods and contexts as I have
found tends to be either so vague as to be useless (it means precisely nothing to
say that 'So-and-so admired Sparta') or else actually exaggerated. I was left,
therefore, to my own resources: and the subject, though often of minor
importance, is a vast one. I am very much aware of my incompetence adequately
to deal with the twenty-seven or so centuries involved, as of the frequent
superficialities and probable inaccuracies of my rash attempt. But it seems to me
that what is so fascinating is the whole tale in all its length and variety, and
therefore that a first sketch was worth making and might encourage others to
amend it.
The following chapters cover, I believe, the most important shifts and reversals
of attitude towards Sparta in Western thought. I have given a good deal of space
to eighteenth-century France, since it is here that Sparta's rôle is of some
importance, and seems to have been generally misunderstood. I should have
liked to be able to explore recent developments in Russia (although it seems that
socialists there as elsewhere now prefer Athens to Sparta), and I suspect that
Spain, Holland, Switzerland and Poland have more to offer for certain earlier
periods than here appears. But the book is more than long enough, especially
since I hope that some of the subject's attraction may be felt by readers without
expert knowledge in any of the fields concerned. For this reason I have tried to
avoid scholarly controversy, particularly in the first part of the book: the more
willingly since E. N. Tigerstedt's first volume of his as yet uncompleted work
The Legend of Spartain Classical Antiquity
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in Classical Antiquity, published in 1965 in Sweden (which I read when my
corresponding chapters were well advanced, but which enabled me to fill several
minor gaps), deals at great length with, and provides an immense bibliography
for, the period down to the end of the fourth century B.C. I am naturally also
indebted to the two volumes of P. Ollier Le Mirage Spartiate, a first attempt to
collect the ancient material on the subject.
It remains for me to add that I have not thought it necessary to provide
translations of the passages in other languages. Greek is confined to the
footnotes, while such other quotations, apart from those in French, as remain in
the text, are almost all illustrative of rather than integral to the argument.
The book was conceived and partly written while I was a Leverhulme Research
Fellow at New Hall, Cambridge. I am grateful to various friends and
acquaintances, among whom I should like to mention the late Felix Raab, for the
interest they have taken in my work; in addition, Michael Crawford helped me
over the selection of coins for Plate 1; R. F. Tannenbaum read the typescript and
gave me useful advice in preparing it for the press; and it has owed more, at
every stage, to one who in no way resembles a Spartan Mother, save in her
dislike of unnecessary verbiage.
E.D.R.
New Hall April 1969
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Illustrations: I am indebted to the following for courteous assistance and
permission to reproduce: the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge ( Plate 1 ); the
British Museum (Plates 2, 3, and 6 ); the Royal Academy of Arts, and the
National Trust, Stourhead ( Plate 4 ); and in particular, Monsieur Laclotte,
Director of the Département de Peinture, Musée du Louvre, and Giraudon, Paris
( Plate 5 ).
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CONTENTS
LIST OF PLATES x
1 Introduction 1
2 The Growth of Laconism 12
3 The Fourth Century in Greece 33
4 Laconism in the West 56
5 Plato and Aristotle 61
6 Laconism in the Hellenistic Age 81
7 Laconism Exported 94
8 Under the Empire 107
9 The Middle Ages 116
10 Sparta Rediviva 130
11 Kings and Ephors 158
12 In Utopia and among the Savages 170
13 The Revolutionary Period in England 186
14 Spartans on the Stage 202
15 France in the Eighteenth Century (I) 220
16 France in the Eighteenth Century (II) 242
17 The French Revolution and its Aftermath 268
18 Italy in the Eighteenth Century 301
19 Sparta in Germany 306
20 England: From the Whigs to the Liberals 344
APPENDIX: Note on the United States of America 368
INDEX OF NAMES 371
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 387
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LIST OF PLATES
[between pp. 182 and 183]
1. Lycurgus: Laconian coins of the Roman Period
(bronze, twice
actual size)
2. The Spartan Mother slaying her Son (Gilles Corrozet,
Hécatomgraphie, 1540)
3. Lycurgus and the Two Dogs (Otho Vaenius,
Emblemata Horatiana,
1607)
4. A Spartan Mother and her Son (L. J. F. Lagrenée the
Elder,
Stourhead, Wilts.)
5. Leonidas at Thermopylae (J. -L. David, Musée du
Louvre)
6. Leonidas taking leave of his family (from Glover's
Leonidas, 1804
edition)
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I
INTRODUCTION
ANCIENT SPARTA: a militaristic and totalitarian state, holding down an
enslaved population, the helots, by terror and violence, educating its young by a
system incorporating all the worst features of the traditional English public
school, and deliberately turning its back on the intellectual and artistic life of the
rest of Greece. Such, at least, is the picture, if any, which mention of the name
consciously or unconsciously conjures up in the minds of most people in this
country today. The liberal democratic tradition that dominates modern English
thought has very naturally tended to idealize Sparta's great rival, democratic
Athens; and its consequent distrust of Sparta was reinforced by reaction against a
very different set of political ideas, particularly prominent in Germany, where
admiration for Sparta reached a fantastic conclusion under the Nazis; to some
writers, at that time, Sparta was the most purely Nordic state in Greece, and an
exemplar of National Socialist virtues. Two hundred years ago, however, an
ordinary educated Englishman would most probably have viewed the Spartan
constitution as a prototype of the British limited monarchy in all its perfection;
his French contemporary might have been one of those who revered her, with
Rousseau and others, primarily as an egalitarian, often more or less
communistic, republic. Two hundred years before that she appeared in still other
guises; as the ideal aristocratic republic, for example, practically
indistinguishable from Venice. And so we might go on.
For over two and a half millennia politicians and philosophers, in the light of
their own needs and convictions, have regarded now one aspect and now another
of Sparta as significant. From almost the dawn of Greek history enormous
prestige surrounded her, and this was exploited to recommend the most disparate
virtues and institutions; the occasional reactions are correspondingly obsessive.
Only Rome, sometimes as republic and sometimes as empire, has exerted greater
attraction; influence cannot be measured, and is a word to avoid.
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