I'd like to welcome you to the Eternal Truth blog, the partner of my fiction series titled by the same name. In 2015 I conceptualized the idea of telling the Spartans' story as truly as I could and in 2020 the first book in that aim was published. Since then I've spent the past two years procrastinating the second while trying to yet live true to the creed that inspired me to write the series in the first place. It was only just recently that I realized writing a conjunct blog might assist in this lifelong aim of both understanding these ancient peoples and in turn giving that knowledge back to the world that we all might extract the pertinent lessons from them and be better men, if not modern Spartans in our own right.
I've been a stout student of the Spartans since I was thirteen years old (I'm now 30) both from a literary perspective as well as in my strict (or as strict as I as a flawed human being can be) emulation of them. Over the years I've come to idolize and, as we do with our idols, put them on a pedestal that excludes them from evil or immorality. While I do believe that there was something in their creed that made them a superior brand of human being, I have had to come to terms with the very real fact that they were yet human beings and they were flawed as any of us, and I will not let my idolization blur my illustration of them. I simply seek to convey the facts, and in so doing I believe that their worth will shine through. For the truth shows itself indefatigably by its own proofs. Here, I seek simply to tell the Spartans' story. To tell you what the sources say and at times to examine the veracity of those sources.
I will be completely candid (and you can probably already tell) that based on my research of the Spartans, I hold them above other men. I'm not sure that view will ever change. However, I am but a mortal man with flawed perception and my view of them may at times, if not consistently, be tainted by whatever it is that speaks to me so mightily about them. I will let you judge that for yourselves. My claim is for you to measure through the facts I will present, as is your very view of the Spartans, as evidenced by their actions over a period of a few hundred years (I will only examine the archaic and classical Spartans of roughly the mid eighth to middle fourth centuries BCE, since as an historian of the period I don't believe anything before or after those dates is relevant to the Sparta about which I seek to educate). So, lets dive in.