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Life in fifth century Sparta was tough. For example, the only tool allowed in constructing furniture was an axe.
A Spartan visitor to Athens, seeing a beautifully carved wooden chair, is said to have asked, "Where do you find trees which grow like that?"
King Leonodas, at the Battle of Thermopylae, ordered by the ambassador of the Persian king Xerxes to lay down his arms, replied, " "Come and get them."
Last week, I stood awe-struck before the magnificent and beautiful monument to the heroes who fell at the battle of Thermopylae, and saved Greece, and ultimately Europe, from the horrors of Persian despotist and barbarity. Their epitaph, written by Simonides and recorded on the monument and in the Greek Anthology:
Ὦ ξεῖν', ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.
My translation, humbly submitted as accurate and prodosically correct, but without pretension to being poetry:
Go tell the Lacedaimonians, passer-by
Obedient to their orders, here we lie.
Like the Spartans themselves, it is pithy, lapidary, terse, and has a certain dry humour.
And what did they die for? Not for the Greek gods, who were, morally, grossly inferior to their worshippers. The answer is simple: they fought and died for their honour, a pagan concept, perhaps, but none the worse for that. The duty of a Spartan was to win or die, and in the performance of this duty lay his honour. I cannot, will not, believe that to those who knew not God, or His Son, His mercy does not extend, for I cannot believe that God is less merciful and generous than His creatures. Those who fought for Country, Home, Family, and Hearth were following a prompting of nature as natural as hunger and thirst, and I hope to be worthy to meet them in Heaven.
If Honour is a mere figment of paganism, then so are Love, Friendship, Patriotism, Good Manners, Art, Music, Literature, and all that strives to make life more beautiful and harmonious in this vale of tears.
