Around 540 BC, the Greek state of Sparta sent an embassy to the court of the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great. This was a busy time for Cyrus, whose main thoughts were on expanding his empire. One aspect of this expansion was of particular concern to the Spartans, who had agreed an alliance with the powerful Greek colony on the Asian mainland, Lydia. King Croesus, who decided to attack Cyrus in 547 BC after receiving the gloriously ambiguous message from the Delphic oracle that if he attacked Cyrus, a great empire would be destroyed, ruled Lydia. He attacked, and Cyrus defeated Croesus and absorbed the Greek colony into the Persian empire (though now conquered, the Greek colonists would remain in Asia Minor for around another 2500 years, until the secular Turkish rule of Kemal Ataturk).
This Persian victory was not good news for the Spartans, who, instead of aiding the Lydians, had decided to occupy themselves by attacking an old enemy, the Greek state of Argos, which they duly subdued. The Spartans forced their new subjects to shave their heads as a mark of submission, and vowed themselves to let their own hair grow long. Long hair was considered woefully effeminate in Greek culture, but the Spartans didn’t care – they had no need to prove their manhood to anyone (as their boyfriends would of course testify, homosexual acts as such being not necessarily effeminate).
The Spartan embassy was sent to Cyrus as a mark of both reproof and as a thinly veiled threat: mess again with Greeks and you might have to mess with us. The encounter is recorded much later (c. 430 BC) by the Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus has not always been seen as unvaryingly reliable, but there is no reason to doubt his account of what happened at this clash of cultures. Cyrus seems to have been baffled by these very un-Greek like emissaries, clad in vermillion cloaks and wearing their hair long and oiled. He asked some Greeks at his court ‘Who are the Spartans?’ but was not much interested in the answer. The Spartans were clearly weird – as his courtiers would have confirmed – but, however warlike, not of great import to the conqueror of great cities such as Babylon.
The Spartans, for their part, were probably blissfully unaware on their voyage home that the great king had very likely already forgotten this eccentric embassy. For the Spartans, as for all Greeks, Asia was where Troy fell to the Spartan king Menelaus and his cast of heroes, as recorded by Homer in the Iliad, humanity’s great epic poem of war. They were going home to their city from a land they had once subdued in blood and fire, home to a Sparta dominated by the tomb of Menelaus and his troublesome wife, Helen (in actual fact, the Homeric heroes and beauties were a different group of Greeks to the Spartans, who were late incomers into the region. but such awkward details rarely disrupt the flow of national or regional myths). The knowledge that Troy’s destruction was little thought of or even known of in the land of Cyrus, was quite probably not one that could be comfortably absorbed into the Spartan consciousness.
What Happened Next
Western historians have tended to portray the Greeks as ‘folks like us’, good democratic westerners in embryo, in contrast to the Persians, who are the very prototype of an evil eastern empire, but this is a sloppy reinvention of the past. Cyrus was tolerant of his subject’s customs and religions and established sound laws, whereas the Spartans regarded the ritualised killing of subject Greeks as a socially beneficent activity. While the Greeks in general may often seem quite like us (if we disregard the Taliban-like sexual apartheid), the Spartans were just different, and were regarded as such by their fellow Greeks. Moderns may feel more in tune with Sparta with regard to some aspects of relations between men and women – tales of the loose behaviour of Spartan women, who were educated, and exercised openly, were passed around in hushed tones among scandalised non-Spartans – but in truth Sparta was a deeply alien, violent culture.
As Tom Holland says in Persian Fire, (2005), the question, ‘Who are the Spartans?’, asked once in derision, could have been asked again later by many Persians, but in fear; perhaps most dramatically at Thermopylae in 480, where an astonished Persian scout watched the 300 Spartans comb each other’s hair in calm disregard of what would soon be streaming up the pass towards them. The Persian invader, Xerxes, offered good terms for surrender of arms: the Spartan general Leonidas said in return: ‘come and get them’.
Also standing with the Spartans in the pass were about 300 of their own serfs (helots), around 400 Thebans, and 700 Thespians. The Thespians can perhaps be seen as ‘acting Spartans’ – the majority of them certainly fought and died as bravely, but it is those chilling Spartans whom everyone remembers: as Holland says: ‘Shielded behind their mountain frontiers, self-sufficient, xenophobic and suspicious, the Spartans took but never gave, spied but never revealed’.