Re-fighting the Peloponnesian War: Antiquity in Modern Greek Politics

Anyone paying attention to Greek politics would have noticed a new but familiar name emerge in the 2023 elections, oi Spartiates (the Spartans). A closer look will have revealed the worrying fact that the Spartans sudden rise to parliament was due to the support of an imprisoned neo-Nazi. The connection between certain ideas of Classical Sparta and the far-right can rarely have been more explicit.

In the debate over the reception and use of antiquity in contemporary politics there can be few more interesting and instructive examples as Greece. The use of antiquity in Greece during its years of crisis (2008-2018) and subsequently, points both to dangers and potential inspiration. Alongside the familiar use of Sparta by the far-right, other examples seek to use the history of democracy to inspire change. Interestingly these rival uses of the classics break down along familiar lines. Two and a half millennia later we are once again looking at a contest between Spartans and Athenians.

The Spartans

The adoption of selective Spartan imagery to bolster far-right messages of masculinity, militarism, racism and a supposed defence of Europe and the West are well-attested . The hoplite helmet, the Spartan lamda, and the slogan Molon Labe have been spotted amongst far-right groups across Europe and the USA . In Greece the connection has often been even more explicit. Before the Spartans there was Golden Dawn (Xrysi Avgi). The leadership of this extreme party went as far as claiming descent from the Mani on the southern tip of the Peloponnese , a remote area said to a remnant of ancient Sparta. In this sense the most prominent far-right party of the modern era actually claimed to be Spartans.

Two details of the Spartan story were of particular use to Golden Dawn: Thermoplyae and the Krypteia. Thermoplyae, a place with long connections to Greek fascism , was one of their favourite backdrops as Golden Dawn held numerous rallies in front of the statue of Leonidas. Thermoplyae is a useful shorthand for a politics of civilisational confrontation between West and East and as such is used as a support to Golden Dawn’s racist and anti-immigrant agenda.

In this Golden Dawn were not alone.

As the crisis deepened a number of governments tried to divert attention to the increasing number of desperate people seeking shelter in Europe and crossing Greek borders. In 2012 Prime Minister Antonis Samaras even went as far as to label these people “unarmed invaders” and his government claimed this was a greater threat than the state’s near bankruptcy. This all played into the hands of Golden Dawn and their bid to be the new Spartans holding the gates.

When the Turkish state cynically encouraged people to try and cross the Greek border in early 2020 the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis reacted by sending riot police to the border and temporarily suspending the right to asylum. Social media memes spread showing Greek hoplites holding Europe’s borders against this supposed eastern horde. This imagery was unfortunately echoed by the European Commission President von der Leyen when she thanked Greece for being “our European aspida (shield)”.

One of Golden Dawn’s most chilling Spartan borrowings was their own version of the Krypteia. In 2008 at Thermoplyae they claimed the Krypteia was the “silent attack on internal enemies of the city in absolute darkness” . Golden Dawn mobilised antiquity to justify and promote its violent street gangs. Golden Dawn attacks on immigrants, leftists and anarchists increased during the years of their ascendancy in 2009-2013. Their supporters murdered a Pakistani immigrant, Shehzad Luqman, in 2013 and at the height of their influence in September 2013 they murdered the Greek anti-fascist musician Pavlos Fyssas. The latter murder brought a backlash that ultimately led to their downfall and the conviction of the leadership as a criminal organisation in 2020.

However, other groups on the far-right borrowed the same references. A group responsible for a number of attacks on immigrants after the decline of Golden Dawn took the name Krypteia.

The link to Sparta also performed a more specific role based on an earlier example of Spartan reception. It is well known that the Nazis and Hitler held their own idealised vision of the Spartans. Golden Dawn’s parades at Thermoplyae with their ranks of black-shirted, torch-bearing members echoed the Nuremberg rallies. The advantage this offered to Golden Dawn was that they could hide their neo-Nazi roots in plain sight.

In the same way that the party’s leadership dismissed swastika tattoos as ancient Greek symbols, the Spartans allowed Golden Dawn to hold Nazi-style rallies and say they were merely honouring their ancient ancestors. Golden Dawn, you see, were not neo-Nazis, they merely looked and talked like Nazis because they were just normal nationalists and patriots who happened to have an interest in (very selective) aspects of history.

New parties and formations such as the Spartans emerged following the downfall of Golden Dawn to pick up the far-right votes in subsequent elections. The Spartans were a hitherto unknown group before winning 12 seats in parliament in their first national election in 2023. They had few policy offers to make to voters.

Several weeks after the elections, the policy pages on their website were suitably Laconic, being mostly empty and works in progress. What they did have was the support of Ilias Kasidiaris, a prominent and imprisoned member of Golden Dawn. Kasidiaris has tried to run for office from jail and has successfully used social media to maintain a following. However, once he was banned from running, the Spartans stood in as a good surrogate.

The Athenians

So far the story has been depressingly familiar as the far-right appropriates aspects of ancient history to promote its agenda. More hopeful moments can be found if you to turn away from Sparta and cross the lines of the Peloponnesian War to Athens.

Though it was not taken up with the same unquestioning enthusiasm with which the far-right adopted Sparta, the left, progressive and anarchist movements in Greece drew on Athenian democracy during the crisis as part of an attempt to build alternatives to the dire situation the country found itself in. While the country struggled with debt and a democratic deficit, references abounded to Athenian democracy, Solon and Seisachtheia and the Agora.

With the Greek state heavily indebted, and the internationally mandated solution being further debts, there was one obvious Athenian figure to turn to.

Solon and his Seisachtheia bolstered, ultimately unheeded, calls for debt audits and cancellation. Parallels were drawn between 6th century BCE Athenians struggling under unpayable debts and becoming the slaves of a wealthy elite and the Greek citizens of the 21st century CE trying to make ends meet during a crisis many viewed as caused by their elites . Seisachtheia enjoyed a wide currency featuring in book titles , speeches of opposition leaders , and even in the defence speeches of anarchist guerillas .

In the summer of 2011 Greek protesters started an experiment in direct democracy. Inspired by contemporary events in Egypt and Tunisia, the standard protest march was transformed into a permanent occupation of prominent public spaces around the country, most notably Syntagma Square below the parliament in Athens. This “movement of the squares” or “aganaktismenoi (indignant)” as it became known was more than just a protest. Within these gathering thousands of people took part in open-air popular assemblies to discuss the crisis and organise their movement. For its proponents these assemblies a direct response to the failures of the representative parliament that had brought the country to crisis.

These assemblies drew on an established tradition in Greece of forming neighbourhood assemblies for political campaigns, a tradition that had picked up momentum since the December 2008 youth- and anarchist-led protests. But people naturally reached for even deeper traditions. Participants in the first of the organised assemblies in Syntagma quickly referenced Athens as the birthplace of democracy and noted that their assembly was being held a short walk away from the ancient Athenian assembly place of the Pnyx . The use of randomly-chosen and time-limited slots to address the assembly in Syntagma was compared to the role of sortition in Athenian practice .

Other symbolic locations of Athenian democracy were also called upon as parallels. If Syntagma was not the Pnyx then perhaps the open-air encampment which lasted for two months (May-July 2011) was instead a new agora. Like Seisachtheia the word agora often came up during the crisis and has since been used as the title for a number of activist documentaries exploring the crisis and its continuing effects.

At its height this movement created popular assemblies in all the major cities and towns of Greece and, in many of them, spread into neighbourhoods to form a network of assemblies. The main objective, to stop the austerity measures that were imposed by Greece’s lenders, failed but the assemblies were at the centre of continuing protests, organised mutual aid, and alternative economic projects in subsequent years.

The extent to which this movement drew on Athenian democracy should not be overstated.

The main inspirations were a mixture of established practices and the examples of movements in Spain and the Middle East and North Africa in 2010-2011. More important than the practical precedent Athenian democracy offered was its symbolic resonance. Many people in Greece experienced the crisis as a loss of democracy. Even when the rules of democracy were followed and the electorate voted against austerity measures, their opinions were ignored. Evoking the well known cliché of Athens as the birthplace of democracy only further highlighted its current lack while simultaneously holding out the prospect of its rebirth through collective action.

What is of interest to us here is that while the example of Athenian democracy was drawn upon, it was not embraced wholeheartedly as with the far-right and the Spartans. The role of slavery in the economy, the limited rights of foreigners (metics), and the overall patriarchal nature of society prevents Classical Athens being promoted widely as a model. While Golden Dawn and the far-right were happy to pretend to be Spartans, Greek protesters, assembly-goers and anarchists were reluctant to embrace their role as Athenians as that would clash with a number of their values.

Conclusions

The example of contemporary Greece supports the suggestion of MacSweeney et al (2019): Currently the right and far-right are more comfortable using antiquity in their politics. The far-right in Greece has used the Spartans to position Greece as Europe’s border guard, to justify violence against “internal enemies”, and in the extreme case of Golden Dawn, to thinly veil its Nazism. In contrast, left, progressive and anarchist uses of Athens was present but more hesitant and debated.

If we are to recast the reception of antiquity as the latest round of the Peloponnesian War, it seems the Spartans still have the upper hand. However, the example of Greece shows us that not all is lost in the continuous debate over the Classics. Memories of antiquity can bolster and give confidence to positive change just as much as they can reinforce negative tendencies.

Further Reading

• Barrière, V and Hedin, J (2023). Mélancolie spartiate: 300 ou la réactivation du mythe de Léonidas pour mobiliser la société contra le déclin de l’Occident. 9-20. Frontière·s Revue d’archéologie, histoire & histoire de l’art no.9.

• Gardener, C (2019). The Origins and Evolution of Ancient Spartan Identity in the Mani Peninsula, Greece. Thersites. 19. 177-208.

• Hamilakis, Y. (2007). The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford University Press. Oxford

• Roche, H. Later Reception and Modern Reconstruction of Sparta. Deconstructing Sparta, a distance-learning course prepared by the University of Leicester.

• MacSweeney, N et al (2019). Claiming The Classical: The Greco-Roman World In Contemporary Political Discourse. 1-19. Council of University Classical Departments Bulletin 48 (2019)

About the author

Neil Middleton studied Ancient History and Archaeology at Manchester University, and later earned a Masters in Ancient History from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. His main interests are the politics, culture and country of Greece, past and present.