Recently an American magazine published an article by the author Myke Cole entitled:"The fetish of Sparta, a spiritual cancer". As the title suggests, Cole is no fan of ancient Sparta. But from this to the complete distortion of the historical truth there is a huge distance.
He claims that those of Sparta are an "untold myth" and a "spiritual cancer" on which Nazism stepped. And it connects ancient Sparta with the modern ideologies of "white supremacy" and other nonsense.
He argues that the historical position that wants the Spartans to be elite warriors is wrong as Sparta had lost battles. Excellent logic. And the Romans lost battles, the Assyrians and Napoleon. Does that make them, historically, bad warriors? Which army in its history has not been defeated? Does this happen to be a serious argument?
He also argues that Sparta was hardly victorious in the Peloponnesian. This is true but it has to do with the naval superiority of their Athenian rivals who did not dare face the Spartans on the battlefield and when they did they were crushed. Even when the Spartans invaded Attica every year, the Athenians shut themselves up within their walls.
Even worse Cole does not see in the battle of Thermopylae any Greek and especially Spartan glory but simply a three-day delay of Xerxes' army. Even if we accept that the numbers given by Herodotus for the Persian forces are exaggerated, even if the Persians were only 100,000, or 50,000 or even 10,000truly how is the decision of 1,000 Greeks (300 Spartans, 700 Thespians) to stay and fight them knowing that they could only expect death?
So what exactly is heroism for the American writer drinking beer and hamburgers; And the example that these 1,000 Greeks set over the centuries doesn't count at all? At Plataea, the Greeks had Leonidas and his men as their slogan of victory.
And why does Cole bring out so much hatred for Sparta, going so far as to write that the battle of Thermopylae has a strong "racist and anti-immigrant flavor"! Were the Persians immigrants? They were invaders. No one called them and the Greeks did an excellent job of slaughtering them as invaders who were in their homeland.
Even more misguided is the American author's attempt to connect ancient Sparta with Nazism. How Hitler saw Sparta, Thebes or Kato Surmena was a matter of his own perspective, historical knowledge and stupidity. It is not the fault of Sparta, a city of the ancient world, if a backward racist like Hitler saw in it what he himself wanted to see.
A key aspect of correct historical perspective is to see and judge persons, events and situations in their historical context, common in their time. Historical time jumps are ahistorical. Nor does Leonidas' "Molon Lave" have anything Nazi in it. The Greeks have said the same phrase, with a different wording, thousands of times in their history as it is not a custom even 300 years old like Mr. Cole's.