Last spring, 28 Tory hardliners unleashed another round of havoc on British politics, refusing to vote for Prime Minister Theresa May’s compromise Brexit plan and paving the way for her replacement by Britain’s Trump variant, Boris Johnson. The group of hardcore Euroskeptics dubbed themselves “Spartans” for their singleminded willingness to hold the line, to sacrifice anything in obedience to their convictions. British news outlets ran with the moniker; the Daily Mail praised the group’s efforts to sink its own government as “The last stand of the Spartans.”

Last August, Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the right-wing anti-government and anti-immigration American militia group Oath Keepers, appeared on conspiracy media outlet Infowars to announce the launch of “Spartan training groups” that would prepare armed Americans to defend the country from the “violent left.” The Oath Keepers’ website also invokes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance,” which exhorts readers to “hear the whistle of a Spartan fife”—a nod to references in both Thucydides and Plutarch that the Spartans used the double-reeded, oboe-like aulos to keep in step while marching to battle.



Ancient Sparta’s influence is all around us, providing a litany of patron saints for spectacular last stands. There’s a word for this mania in Western cultures: laconophilia, taken from Laconia, the region the Spartans hailed from. Most of us have never heard of laconophilia, even as we live in a world so dramatically shaped by it, but it has a hand in everything from the French Revolution to the British educational system to the Ivy League to the Israeli Kibbutz movement. There are at least 39 municipalities named after Sparta in America alone, and I gave up counting the number of American and Canadian high school sports teams named “the Spartans” once I hit 100 (Michigan State and San Jose State, both NCAA Division I teams, are also named after them). The very word spartan transcends the historical city-state to which it once referred; it can now refer to anyone or anything marked by strict self-denial, frugality, or the avoidance of comfort—reflecting the legend of the Spartans, rather than who they actually were.

That the legend has little to do with the real Spartans would be an academic point, but this myth has now turned malignant, with laconophilia taking on darker and ever more dangerous tones. The stylized Corinthian helmet worn by King Leonidas in 300, the 2006 hit movie mythologizing the Spartan role at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.E., is now most often seen on T-shirts, flags, and bumper stickers above the Greek words “ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ,” or molon labe, which translates to “come and take them,” the Spartan king’s apocryphal, defiant response to Persian ruler Xerxes’s demand that the Greeks surrender their arms. For pro-gun advocates, molon labe has become a rallying cry of resistance to perceived government overreach.

“Defend your values, your civilization, your district”: A neofascist message from Italy’s Alleanza Nazionale party. theenemy.com.br

This paranoid vision of a government coming to take your guns, or an alien invader coming to take your culture, has led to more troubling invocations of the Spartan myth, and not just in Anglophone countries. The Greek neo-fascist party Golden Dawn gathers each year at Thermopylae, lighting torches and chanting anti-immigrant nationalist slogans. “The message of Leonidas—molon labe (come and get it)—is as timely today as ever for everything tormenting Greece,” Golden Dawn higher-up Eleftherios Synadinos, a former special forces general and a member of the European Parliament, told the assembled partisans there in 2015, just before the crowd broke out into chants of “People! Army! Nationalism!” In Italy, Alleanza Nazionale, a rebranding of the fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano after its 1995 dissolution, has used Spartan imagery reminiscent of 300 in propaganda posters captioned “Defend your values, your civilization, your district.”