THEY MAY JUST BE IN IT FOR THE HOMOEROTICISM:

A bit has been written in these pages recently about the current "tacticool" craze: the lionization of U.S. Navy SEALs and other special operators in imitative street wear that, like laconophilia, speaks to a deep-seated sense of inadequacy. The wildly popular military apparel companies Grunt Style and 5.11 Tactical have huge followings among civilians who have never and will never serve in the military, sporting tactical gear or T-shirts invoking military catchphrases (frequently praising the Spartans), replete with magazine pouches that will never hold ammunition, and FFI (Friend-Foe-Identifier) patches designed to prevent military friendly-fire incidents. 

The ancient Athenians had their own "tacticool" phase, it seems. Xenophon reported the famous Athenian philosopher Socrates wearing only a single, filthy, thin cloak, aping Spartan fashion. A bronze from Pompeii depicts Socrates and the philosopher Diotima, showing Socrates in what some scholars identify as the thin cloak of the Spartans--the triboun--and leaning on what could be a bakteurion--the T-shaped staff carried by Spartan leaders and officials. The Athenian orator Demosthenes criticized "men who by day put on sour expressions and pretend to play the Spartan, wearing short cloaks and single-soled shoes, but when they get together and alone leave no kind of wickedness or indecency untried." Even the famous Aristotle, more critical of Sparta, admitted that its constitution produced virtuous citizens obedient to law. In Aristophanes's The Birds, the comic playwright notes men "were mad for Sparta; they wore their hair long and honored fasting, they went filthy as Socrates and carried staves." 

The historian Polybius was an Achaean, bound to the Roman alliance that dominated Sparta, which had long been in decline before he wrote in the later Hellenistic Age. Yet even he wrote that if safety and security were what you wanted, "there is not now nor has there ever been government better than Sparta's." After its complete fall from power, Sparta remained a tourist attraction for the ancients. The Roman senator Cicero described visiting Sparta to witness the diamastigôsis, the ancient ritual where Spartan boys were flogged bloody, and sometimes to death, before the altar of Artemis Orthia. In the days of Thermopylae, the ritual had been part of Sparta's famed agōgē, but many scholars believe that in Cicero's time it was made even more brutal to satisfy the crowds of tourists. In the third century, the Spartans added an amphitheater to better accommodate the crowds who came to watch. Throughout this Roman-dominated period, the purportedly wealth-hating and xenophobic Spartans engaged in the usual methods that tourist economies employ to attract foreigners and separate them from their money: hosting fairs and creating tax-exemptions to attract merchants, encouraging commerce however they could. 

Laconophilia marched on throughout Western arts and letters, and always on the same theme--praising the Spartans' legendary selflessness, restraint, and devotion to duty. The third-century Egyptian Christian apologist Origen Adamantius compared Leonidas' self-sacrifice at Thermopylae to Christ's passion. Synesius of Cyrene, a fifth-century Christian bishop, proudly (and falsely) traced his lineage to the Spartan royal houses. In the Renaissance, even Machiavelli got in on the act, praising Sparta in his Discourses on Livy: "That republic, indeed, may be called happy, whose lot has been to have a founder so prudent as to provide for it laws under which it can continue to live securely, without need to amend them; as we find Sparta preserving hers for eight hundred years, without deterioration and without any dangerous disturbance." (Sparta achieved nothing of the sort, but in Machiavelli's massaging of anecdotes, the ends justify the means.) John Alymer, the bishop of London just after Machiavelli's time, called Sparta "the noblest and best city governed that ever was."

Perhaps the greatest summary of Renaissance attitudes toward Sparta is captured in Michel de Montaigne's Of Cannibals, which performs the astonishing mental gymnastics necessary to hold the decimation at Thermopylae higher than the successful battles that actually pushed the Persians out of Greece: "There are defeats more triumphant than victories. Never could those four sister victories, the fairest the sun ever beheld, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and Sicily, venture to oppose all their united glories, to the single glory of the defeat of King Leonidas and his men, at the pass of Thermopylae."

American founding father Samuel Adams lamented that his native Boston would never be the "Christian Sparta" he had hoped for. Fellow founding father John Dickinson considered the Spartans to be "as brave and free a people as ever existed." Adams's contemporary, the legendary Jean-Jacques Rousseau, practically drooled over Sparta's myth, praising "that city as famous for its happy ignorance as for the wisdom of its laws, whose virtues seemed so much greater than those of men that it was a Republic of demi-gods rather than of men." This just skims the surface, miles wide and fathoms deep, of the legions of historical thinkers and writers in love with the Spartan mirage, distant and wavering.

For much of this time, laconophilia was a relatively benign ahistorical myth, but Spartan admiration unmistakably turned malignant in the late-nineteenth century with the advent of scientific racism. German scholar Karl Müller included in his influential Geschichten hellenischen Stämme und Städte a history of the Dorian race responsible for founding classical Sparta. Müller's work lionized the invaders' Northern origins, which dovetailed into the early evolution of Nordicism, the pseudo-anthropological notion of a Nordic master race that would become a cornerstone of Nazi ideology. Müller was hardly alone, and European thinking about inherent inequality and Nordic superiority was already maturing in the fevered minds of thinkers like the French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, whose writings influenced the famous composer and German nationalist icon Richard Wagner. It is not surprising that Adolf Hitler saw in Sparta "the first völkisch state" and gushed about the ancient city-state's legendary eugenics: "The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more human than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject."

Companies like Grunt Style might symbolize today's molon labe culture, but the phrase has long captured the imagination of would-be warriors holding what they believed were hopeless positions. We cannot be certain that revolutionary Colonel John McIntosh was channeling Leonidas when the British demanded he surrender Fort Morris to them in 1778, but we do know his famous reply: "Come and take it!" The same cry was uttered by Texian settlers 57 years later in response to the Mexican army's demand that they return a borrowed cannon. The words were emblazoned beneath an image of the cannon on a battle flag flown at the Battle of Gonzales where Mexican dragoons skirmished unsuccessfully with the Texian rebels to decide the matter. As University of Iowa classics professor Sarah E. Bond points out in her own recent critique of Sparta mythmaking, in all these instances, "the phrase stays true to the ancient context within which it was allegedly first spoken."

That same cannon and phrase are today emblazoned above crossed meat cleavers on the flag of the American Guard--a hard-right white-supremacist group that evolved from the Indiana chapter of Soldiers of Odin USA, an extreme anti-immigrant and anti-refugee group that originated in Finland in 2015. Senator Ted Cruz has repeatedly invoked the same phrase. 

Molon labe is the motto of multiple military units, most notably the United States Special Operations Command Central. But the phrase has special currency with the National Rifle Association and the gun-advocacy community in the United States, where it is a warning growl of the willingness to use violence to uphold the right to bear arms against government infringement. A quick search on social media will reveal the words in both English and Greek--almost always blazoned beneath the stylized Corinthian helmet--inlaid into gun handles, tattooed on skin, and pressed on T-shirts, key chains, pens, bumper stickers, and patch after patch after patch, usually velcroed onto tactical packs carried by military and civilian alike. Molon labe is so synonymous with right-wing gun-fetishism that political opponents have coined a mocking term, "moron label," to counter those under its thrall.

But this twisted veneration of the Spartan myth looms larger than just Leonidas's single quote. Thermopylae imagery was rife among supporters of Trump's presidential bid. A still-public 2016 YouTube video posted by a user under the handle "Aryan Wisdom" depicted then-candidate Trump as Leonidas, holding back a Persian army that included Soros and Obama. At the time of this writing, the video has been viewed over five million times. The far-right white nationalist Identitarian movement's symbol, blazoned in gold against a black background, is the circle of an aspis, the round shield that was a Spartan warrior's principal piece of equipment. It is divided by the upside-down V of the Greek lambda, the sigil falsely believed to have been painted on Spartan shields at Thermopylae. "Generation Identity," a fast-growing European Identitarian party, explains the significance of adopting the Spartan shield for its movement by way of relating the 300 myth: "Both ancient and modern writers have used the Battle of Thermopylae as an example of the power of a patriotic army defending its native soil." This appears on the site's "frequently asked questions" page, just above a section titled "What does the term 'Great Replacement' mean and who is responsible for it?"

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