Episthenes - elite warrior and lover of boys

Episthenes – Elite Fighter and Lover of Boys

Euge!

For I moment I thought I was mistaken about the provenance of this intriguing and dramatic vignette, having mentioned it a few weeks to a fellow Legendite. I did get the story slightly wrong. My memory had added a horse for some reason (echoes of Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play ‘Equus’), but I got the atmosphere about right. A beautiful boy, his admirer offering his neck to him and the life of both spared. It’s a curious and erotically charged vision on the battle scarred frozen slopes of Thracia, in stark contrast (or perhaps parallel) to the cruelty and wanton blood lust of Seuthes.

I give the text in translation taken from public domain sources. It is relatively unusual to openly cite the soldier as a paederastes and perhaps Xenephon’s reason for including this is to contrast the love between soldiers and youths or close bonds between males based on love with that of the cruel and heartless attitudes common amongst barbarians such as the barbarian leaders the Greeks found themselves fighting with and against.

It’s a peculiar and strangely alluring scene which for me really stuck in the memory – possibly because of the idea of an overriding passion and spontaneous offer of a warrior’s life for the love of a beautiful boy about to be needlessly slain; for the ideal of beauty and the promise of love to lay one’s life on the line. It may well have been merely a dramatic gesture on Episthenes’ part and not so much of a gamble since, after all, as an elite mercenary hoplite he would have been a highly prized and indispensable military unit. If Xenephon’s prize horse could fetch as much as 50 Darics, how much more valuable must the best front line warriors of the age have been.

Here is the excerpt

Xenephon, Anabasis VII/4.7-11

[7]There was a certain Episthenes of Olynthus who was a lover of boys, and upon seeing a handsome boy, just in the bloom of youth and carrying a light shield, on the point of being put to death, he ran up to Xenophon and besought him to come to the rescue of a handsome lad.
[8] So Xenophon went to Seuthes and begged him not to kill the boy, telling him of Episthenes' turn of mind, how he had once assembled a battalion with an eye to nothing else save the question whether a man was handsome, and that with this battalion he proved himself a brave man.

[9] And Seuthes asked: “Would you even be willing, Episthenes, to die for this boy's sake?” Then Episthenes stretched out his neck and said, “Strike, if the lad bids you and will be grateful.”

[10] Seuthes asked the boy whether he should strike Episthenes in his stead. The boy forbade it, and besought him not to slay either. Thereupon Episthenes threw his arms around the boy and said: “It is time, Seuthes, for you to fight it out with me for this boy; for I shall not give him up.”

And Seuthes laughed and let the matter go. He resolved, however, to establish a camp where they were, in order that the people on the mountain should not be supplied with food from these villages, either.

[11] So he himself went quietly down the mountain and encamped upon the plain, while Xenophon with his picked men took quarters in the uppermost village below the summit and the rest of the Greeks close by, among the so-called “mountain” Thracians.

[Sources Used: Xenophon. Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 3. Carleton L. Brownson. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. 1922

The Good, the bad and the thoroughly disreputable: Xenephon's Anabasis Book II, Chapter 6.

The Good, the bad and the thoroughly disreputable: moral sketches of of Clearchus, Proxenus and Meno in Xenephons Anabasis 2.6

Eheu! We find a remarkable turn of events for the Greek mercenary force accompanying Cyrus the Younger in his attempt to overthrow his brother Atarxerxes and seize the throne. After assembling at Sardis and making their way through the citied plains and low hills of Phrygia (as described in Book 1) the combined Greek and barbarian mercenary force do battle at Cunaxa. It’s a very mixed result since although the Greek forces rout all before them, Cyrus is killed in battle following a rash attempt to personally kill Atarxerxes, rendering any victory hollow indeed.

The Greeks including our narrator Xenephon are now leaderless, without allies, surrounded by hostile forces in a strange and inhospitable land. During a truce meeting with the Persian forces set up by the perfidious Tissaphernes, the Greek generals are seized and later executed. Clearchus, the erstwhile leader of the expedition together with Proxenus and Meno are given short moralistic obituaries in chapter 6. It is interesting to look at how Xenephon holds them up to the glass of posterity and contrasts them with each other and by implication his previous account of the death of Cyrus. I looked at this chapter through the eyes of two translators, Edward Spelman (d.1767) and Robin Waterfield (2005) to see how they dealt with Xenephon’s Attic Greek – renowned for its lucidity and elegance. There is a similarity between the two translators in that they are both independent scholars and authors as opposed to institution attached academics. Spelman in particular seemed disdainful of the universty education of his day. But there the similarity ends, Spelman being a gentleman of leisure and of independent means due to his inherited seat and wealth, Waterfield a modern professional writer earning his living by his pen. Edward Gibbon the renowned historian thought Spelman’s translations to be the finest available in the English language at the time.

Here are the opening sentences of Book II Chapter 6, first Spelman and then Waterfield.

'The generals, being thus apprehended, were carried off to the king, by whose orders their heads were cut off. One of them, Clearchus, was allowed by all that knew him to have been a man both of a military genius, and one who delighted in war to the last degree; for, as long as the Lacedaemonians were at war with the Athenians, he continued in the service of his country; but after the peace he persuaded his fellow-citizens that the Thracians oppressed the Greeks; and having prevailed on the ephori, by some means or other, he set sail with a design to make war on the Thracians, who inhabit above the Chersonesus and Perinthus.'

(Edward Spelman Expedition of Cyrus p.107, 1742)

'The Greek generals who were captured as described were taken to the king and beheaded. One of them, Clearchus, was universally held by those who knew him to have been not just good at warfare, but absolutely devoted to it. For example, he stayed around while the Spartans were at war with the Athenians, but after the peace treaty he presuaded his fellow citizens that Greeks were suffering at Thracian hands, and once he had managed to get his way with the ephors, he set sail to make war on the Thracians who live beyond the Chersonese and Perinthus.'

(Robin Waterfield The Expedition of Cyrus p.50-51 Oxford World's Classics 2005)

They are pretty close for translations seperated by hundreds of years which is remarkable. Spelman seems to stick quite close to the grammar of the Greek, for example where Clearchus is described in Waterfields translation as 'not just good at warfare but absolutely devoted to it', Spelman keeps the greek kai +adj -kai + adj construction ( aner KAI polemikos KAI philopolemos..') using the expression 'both =noun phrase - and + noun phrase.  Spelmans translation shows how much emphasis was placed on acccuracy or faithfulness to the original Greek. The result is that it sounds as though the text has a starched collar but nevertheless runs quite well. It doesnt come across as a literal translation but one where the underlying greek has a higher visibility. Waterfield has put more work into readability for the modern reader but skillfully making few if any sacrifices to the original sense. Its the lexis, the choice and order of words that depart from the original.

This is further illustrated by Spelmans decision to stay close to the Greek in the following line ' he persuaded his fellow citizens that the Thracians oppressed (Greek : adikousi) the Greeks, where Waterfield has coverted the tense to a past imperfect to emphasize the ongoing oppression and thus a sense of urgency in his appeal to the ephors, ' he persuaded his fellow citizens that the Greeks were suffering at Thracian hands'. Its reads well to the modern eye but there is a resulting slight remove from the Greek original text.

Xenephon had earlier given us a panegyric of Cyrus and the recently killed barbarian would-be king is depicted in on the whole glowing terms. Perhaps then these Greek mercenraries are held up by way of contrast, all the more striking since for each of the Greek (ie non-barbarian) generals, their good points are matched by bad and in the case of Proxenus and Meno the weight is firmly on the bad side of the scales.

A generation ago it would surely have been unthinkable to cast babarians in such a positive and contrasting light, but with Xenephon’s work we are in a new era, that of the professional mercenary and one in which age old loyalties to ones polis and Greek land have undergone severe strain and rupture due the chaos of the Pelopponesian War (431-404 BCE)

Clearchus is an efficient general but a harsh one, feared rather than loved by his men. This will set up a strong contrast when Xenephon emerges later in the anabasis as leader of the 10,000. The moral elements of a good leader are implied by his description of how the generals fall short of the ideal or go against them completely. Proxenus seemed to be out for fame at any cost and as a paying student of the sophist Gorgias of Leontini, Xenephon as a follower and erstwhile protoge of Socrates, underlines this general as morally challenged in his choice of instructor. As a result he is a general 'incapable of inspiring respect or fear, and stood in greater awe of his men than they of him' (Spelman 110). Menon is beyond the pale, as a man after riches, stooping to perjury, falsehood and deceit to attain them. He seemed to regard affection as foolish and would only feign such friendship as would enable him to deceive another. Almost in the nature of a moral payoff Xenephon informs us that Menon was not beheaded like the others but tortured for a year and then after much agony killed as a common malefactor. Here again Spelman keeps close to the Greek (poneros Greek: person of low worth, evildoer). Waterfield extends the contrast with the other generals and glosses this word as ' a man with no redeeming features' which seems to imply that the Persians considered him of insufficient rank or status to merit a swift and honorable decapitation.

Such is the fate of the generals leading to the crisis that forms the real beginning of the march of the ten thousand.

The Gauntlet of Parmenides and atomic laughter in the dark

Parmenides' Gauntlet and Atomic Laughter in the Dark

In defiance of Heraclitus and his famous maxim, I have the distinct feeling that we have stepped in this neck of the river before...ah yes..one of the first blog posts I did way back in 2013 touched upon the Atomists in connection with the poetical masterpiece of the Roman poet Lucretius, the De Rerum Natura. However with Waterfield we get a lot more detail and discussion of the atomists, Leucippus and Democritus (sometimes referred to in some of the fragments as Democrates). It would take me a long time indeed to deal with the detail of the theory in full so I just wanted to make a few points for further discussion which we might touch upon when we meet next time. In particular, how reading the First Philosophers, specifically the previous chapters has enabled us to put the atomists into the wider context of the reaction to Ionian cosmogony, and also to see how Parmenides and his difficult hexameter work  threw down a gauntlet which the later thinkers needed to deal with in order to explain change or matter and its nature at the same time trying not to violate the changeless state approach that Parmenides elaborates in his religiously worded 'Way of Truth'. Remember too that Parmenides is basing his explanation from the realm of pure thought since it is a key claim of his work that the surface changes grasped by the unreliable senses are illusory and not to be trusted. Ultimately change is not possible. This is in distinct contrast with the quasi empirical approach of many of his predecessors.

We are in danger of straying from the core remit of Legendum here in that further discussion of the matters above tend more in the direction of pure ancient philosophy as opposed to literature per se. Its interesting, there is no doubt about that, but I note that we are dealing with Testimonia and Fragments here, often the work of other writers and therefore in the absence of any one writer or body of work we are necessarily reduced to discussing the philosophical concepts themselves. Its a potential distraction I've noticed which could almost lead to the genesis of another blog altogether - that of Ancient or even Pre-Socratic thinkers! One figure looms large in a lot of the testimonia, and that is Aristotle - of whom my knowledge is scanty to say the least. In essence its a caveat we should bear in mind in future when looking at overtly philosophical texts - how deep into the philosophy do we really need or want to go if we are to keep close to the  purpose of Legendum. Of course that is not to say that such works and authors have no place in our investigatory meanderings, and they all have their literary aspects, but nonetheless we should be on our guard not to get too deep into the philosophy, fascinating though it is!

That said I wanted to mention a few points in connection with the atomists. Why and how did they come up with the theory of atoms and void? Did they manage to satisfactorily deal with the Parmenidean challenge and keep inviolate the idea that we can not talk of things which exist, as well as Zeno's important paradox of infinite divisibility? What were the political implications of atomist theories? Did they lead as some scholars have mused to a new scepticism especially about traditional ideas about the formation of the cosmos, the gods and mortals' position and relevance in such a system? How important a feature was atomic theory in the works of Democritus...he was apparently quite a prolific author and although the works themselves are lost, we have via the Testimonia and Fragmenta, many tantalising titles covering a wide variety of fields of enquiry.

I look forward to wrestling with some of these problems with you next time!

Euge!

Why read Tibullus?

It’s been a question I have been struggling with for a few weeks. Admittedly I only have the Loeb version of J.P.Postgate and some fresher versions by Jon Corelis available on line to give me a feeling for Tibullus (55-19 BC). Accordingly, my views are naturally given in the rough and could possibly benefit from a closer reading in the future. Although it’s not an overly extensive canon, there was more poetry that I had at first imagined and as a result have spent quite a while wading through classical illusion and word play and obscure antique erudition so beloved of the time-distanced emulators of Callimachus.

There is no doubt that it’s elegant and detailed richly complex and polished elegy but for me I am not sure whether it transcends the genre in as radical a way as Catullus. There is also a lot of what I call Alexandrine puffery, which I am sure was great stuff in its day but for us less mythologically inclined, one gambolling naiad and Pieirian muse upon high, honey dript lyre and all, heavily resembles another and pops up an awful lot. Tibullus is quite influenced by the Alexandrine style and subject matter and never really pulls away from it to create any genre bending thunderclaps. But I can easily imagine that the cognoscenti outside of Maecenas’s circle of overtly pro-Augustan poetasters thought of him as the man for elegy. None other than Quintilian would have it so:-

‘Elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime videtur auctor Tibullus; sunt qui Propertium malint; Ovidius utroque lascivior, sicut durior Gallus’.

’In Elegy too we rival the Greeks; of whom I consider the author Tibullus to be the most polished and elegant; there are those who prefer Propertius; Ovid is more wanton than both, just as Gallus is more austere." Inst. x. I, 93

I would have to be honest and say that some of the works are difficult to penetrate and properly assay due to the dense mythic and allusive verbiage. It is always redeemed (just about) by beautiful poetry resplendent with sonic glitter and excellent symmetry (a good example of the striking visual arrangement of lexis would be: Book I.IX Against War,

                     ‘tum brevior dirae mortis aperta via est.’.

It is extremely tasteful and sparkling despite (on occasion because of) the Olympian fluffery, but often where Tibullus is dealing with matters of the heart, Delia his first clandestine romance, Marathus, his boy lover or Nemesis his oddly named last fling before his untimely death in 19 BCE, his mastery of elegy is clear and the intimate and poignant notes of the heart sound out across the chasm of millennia and strike a very deep and genuine chord with us moderns indeed.

Themes we could touch upon when we discuss Tibullus could include his boy love, whether it was an Alexandrine affectation or the real thing, his subversive use of martial imagery to be anti-war or at least not as into the Roman sport of war as his pro-Augustan chums, his use of elegy to contrast the city of Rome with the country where he seemed to locate his personal ideal world as a retreat from the nastiness of existence. Tibullus, Republican or Imperial poet?

I don’t have a particular favourite line or elegy but I am rather fond of the opening lines from Book I,II. (To Delia) so I will leave you with that until we meet again.

‘Adde merum vinoque novos compesce dolores,

occupet ut fessi lumina victa sopor;

neu quisquam multo percussum tempora baccho

excitet, infelix dum requiescit amor.

nam posita est nostrae custodia saeva puellae,

clauditur et dura ianua firma sera.’

‘More wine! Let the drink smother these unwelcome pangs

and may conqueror sleep triumph against my weary eyes

nor, when the copious waves of Bacchus have overrun my brain,

shall anyone wake this unhappy lover while he sleeps.

For a cruel guard has been set upon my darling,

and the door is shut and bolted firm against me.’

[Tib.I.II.l.1-6]

Salve atque Vale!

Thucydides on R4

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Ionian Rhapsody - The Milesians

Euge!

Welcome to 2015 where we start the year with the group of thinkers known to modernity as the Pre-Socratics and since there are quite a lot of them it would make sense to try to look at them in a series of groupings. One such group which can be gathered together under the twin roofs of geography and time are Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. These three early thinkers were all living in the Ionian city of Miletus at around the early to mid-6th century BCE and although it’s not clear exactly what the relationship between them is, it has long been a convention to call them the Milesians.

 Why Miletus? What was so special about this city that it became the locus for these early thinkers? It could be due to the status of the city as an important stage on the busy and lucrative trading routes between Egypt via Lebanon to the Ionian coast and even as far as the earliest Black Sea colonies. Miletus benefitted from its position and quickly became a prominent and wealthy polis, where merchants would bring not only produce but ideas and news from distant lands, perhaps there may have even been a wise man or two on the run from the Egyptian or Babylonian authorities of the day who, having ended up in Miletus with its increasingly affluent and literate elite citizens, made a home for himself and traded ideas, techniques, science even for a moderate income. It could even be that men such as Thales had themselves travelled to Egypt and Babylon and picked up some knowledge from the temple priests. What is clear is that these men were the among the first individual we know about in Greece who started making statements about the world around them in an altogether different way from what had been the norm - it has been described by scholars as a paradigm shift, that of the move from trying to structure and describe the physical universe and its phenomena in terms of rational thought (logos) instead of anthropomorphised gods (mythos).

 It is important here to make it clear that pre logos systems such as that of Hesiod or Homer, and for that matter earlier thought systems are not irrational but use mythos to build and make sense of the world around them. Hesiod's system of gods has a method to it and is not the product of madness. But there is a clear difference when we come to the Pre-socratics in that they tried to rationalize phenomena without the aid of the gods as it were and to view the world as a single ordered system subject to natural and laws. The gods are removed from the picture and this alone is a major shift in itself considering the kind of Homeric and Hesiodic paradigms that had defined cosmic understanding up until that time. It must have nothing short of revolutionary to have uttered such new and strange ideas in a god built and god structured universe that was taken as a given by so many. It may even have been politically sensitive and quite dangerous. As is often the case great changes in thought systems are accompanied or even catalysed by upheavals in the political and technological sphere. This was a time when Ionia was becoming a loose federation of increasingly affluent and powerful city states - caught between the machinations of great warring empires, Egypt and Assyria, and due to its neutral or multivalent position, at times feared, at others courted for aid in one campaign or another, finally conquered and then the scene of a tumultuous revolt, the playground of tyrants and sinister intrigues. All of this activity must surely had have some role to play in the dissemination of new ideas, political, technological and philosophical.

The testimonia (following the arrangement as set out by Waterfield in his translation OUP 2000) for these three total 41 short pieces by various ancient sources, notable amongst them, Herodotus (for Thales T1-3), Aristotle (T8,9,11) and our old stoic friend, Seneca (T10). These fragments illuminating as they often are tend to be laced with extraneous elements from the ancient sources themselves and so should be read with caution. There is a potential extra layer of confusion in that the earliest thinkers themselves may not have been unambiguously straightforward or consistent in their utterances and the doxographers could be accurately portraying what were on the face of it, quite dogmatic positions or inconclusive musings open to wide interpretation even in their own time.

The reason for this caveat is that we have to rely on the works of these other ancient writers for much of our information on the presocratics, since their work has not survived in anything more substantial than fragments and partial inscriptions. It is not clear even whether these early thinkers wrote much of their ideas down in any ordered way that we can recognise, and we have to rely on the commentaries of the so-called doxographers, writers whose work consisted of summarising and commenting on the ideas of earlier philosophers. While we owe a lot to these later writers, in particular Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus, we must always be on our guard and be ready with the salt cellar as we read them.

T1-11 deal with Thales, whose floruit can be dated by the story of his prediction of a solar eclipse, in either 585 or 582 BCE. Anaximander and Anaximenes were probably a bit younger than Thales and his junior contemporaries although its not clear whether they knew each other and if they did what kind of interaction they had with each other, pupils? rivals. Perhaps there was an early school of thought, although its unlikely given the variations in their ideas and fields of interests.

The first testimonia for Thales give the picture of a man interested in celestial phenomena but someone also involved with the powers of the day, perhaps as a kind of military or strategic and political advisor. His loose prediction of the eclipse during the battle between the Lydians and the Medes, the diversion of river courses so that they could be forded, and his involvement in Ionian statecraft lend some credence to this. He may have been more like an early sophist in the sense of using the technical knowledge available at the time to advance a career with the powers of the day. He may even have been on a military payroll for his valuable and mysterious services. He comes across as someone who has realised that the observable phenomena are not the divine workings of gods but rather have some kind of rational and potentially discoverable laws underlying them, which, once discovered can be used to human advantage. T8 (Source: Aristotle, Metaphysics 983b6-32 Ross) gives some more details about what we might loosely describe as Thales conclusions about cosmology or the primordial building material of the cosmos. Aristotle reports that for Thales it was water, although whether this is based upon Aristotle's extended speculation is not entirely clear. Thales may have only said that the earth rests upon water and that because the other Milesians are reported as being interested in the primordial element of the universe, Aristotle is ascribing or adducing here.

The most intriguing thing that Aristotle ascribes to Thales is his belief that 'all things were full of gods'. Again, how much of this is the later philosopher is not clear but it seems likely that the early thinkers were still taxed with the position of the consciousness of the universe, especially since they had moved away from mythos but were not able or willing to completely jettison the role of the divine, still mystified as to what powered life itself or what set the elements of the sky in motion or cause man and the beasts to breathe and have motion. The perspective has changed to a human rather than a god interpreted cosmos but the gods or god has not as yet been entirely dethroned by logos.   Even Socrates, who pressed the reset button on a lot of the loose and ambiguous groping in the dark of the early thinkers, still had his divine or spirit advisor and often talked in terms of the god or the divine' - so perhaps it never quite leaves Greek philosophy at all, at least as far as the Classical period is concerned.

Anaximander (T12-28) is attributed with the discovery of the gnomon, the construction and installation of sundials, and the observation of various celestial phenomena. He is also the first to draw a map of the inhabited world on a tablet. Its an incredible idea, even if the map itself was most probably more a highly imaginative sketch based upon navigators experience, hearsay and rumour. Herodotus remarks acidly that it was an amateurish effort drawn with a pair of compasses, noting that Europe and Asia are completely out of proportion.

T15 is where Anaximander is at his most interesting with his idea of the boundless (apeiron in Greek). This seems quite a leap of thought, a boundless not of any element like water or air but of an indeterminate formlessness from which somehow, the opposites and their inter-reactions can develop and lead to the more familiar elements themselves which in turn lead to all other elements and materials as they condense. More interestingly, these elements will decay and fall back into the boundless ' according to necessity; for they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the ordinance of time'. Its not quite GUT (Grand Unified Theory) but nonetheless is a prime example of the paradigm shift that is taking place in the Greek world at this time, a period in which the gods for the majority were very much alive and the source of all wisdom, flowing down to man on a one way channel. Anaximander is wiping that world away with a rational attempt at explicating the very fabric of the cosmos  and how it leads to the world in which we walk and breathe, all without the aid or inclusion of Zeus. What's more interesting is the mileage this concept has enjoyed through philosophy, theological speculation (its similarity to the Late Hellenistic and Gnostic 'pleroma' is striking) and finally science down the centuries. Heisenberg gives a nod to Anaximander when talking about where quanta might originate - and he thought that is something very akin to the apeiron. The fact that in 2015 we are still not entirely sure renders Anaximander's leap of speculation even more astounding.

Anaximander has some fascinating speculations regarding the physical more local phenomena of the universe such as the earth itself, which is 'cylindrical in shape, and three times wide as it is deep' (T22 Ps.-Plutarch, Miscellanies 2.5-11 Diels), and further in T23 where a kind of proto inertia or gravity theory is hinted at. According to the Anaximandrine view of the immediate cosmos, hot and cold became separated, hot moving out and coalescing to a layer of fire, which grew around the earth like a layer of bark, later breaking off and leading to the formation of the stars as isolated patches of this fire. Finally in T27-28, the origin of human life is tentatively theorized, with humans carried until puberty inside fish like creatures from the sea. Its almost there in terms of the first glimmerings of understanding a linear process of development as opposed to the magical 'just-so' creation stories of mythos.

 

Anaximenes T29-41, Shares some concepts with Anaximander but decides that the boundless does have a form and that is air and it is the condensation and rarefaction of this element which leads to the creation of everything in the universe. Cicero goes as far to state that Anaximenes identified air as a God. Again its not clear who is speaking here of the two ancients but it could be possible as I have mentioned before that air as 'divine breath' animated all life and movement in the universe as its mysterious motive force. In the absence of anything else, the earliest thinkers may have used the divine as a handy shorthand for filling in what at the time they could not easily theorize upon. It could also be just the milieu and the times that they lived in - it being literally unthinkable to speak or think entirely in de-mythologised terms.

I have only briefly outlined the main ideas of these three thinkers and it would be quite easy to go into a lot more detail - especially since it's clear from a cursory glance at the bibliography that there is a lot more scholarship on them, particularly Thales and Anaximander. I look forward to sharing your thoughts on these curious figures of early cosmology. 

Plutarch's Moralia

I am marching my way through the Moralia by Plutarch (and possibly others depending on the scholar you happen to follow), currently on volume III where he deals with the moral nature and habits as well as pithy quotations of the Spartans. By all accounts a stern bunch and as happy fighting as throwing themselves from crags or rooftops to preserve their honour. The translations vary, all being Loeb but from different decades. The current volume is Frank Cole Babbit who is reassuringly inter-war 1920s in tone!


Euge!