With it or on it
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe instruction a Spartan mother is said to have given her son as she handed him his shield: come back with this, or on it. Return carrying the shield, or be carried home dead upon it.
It survives in Plutarch's collection of sayings of Spartan women, a compilation of maxims transmitted anonymously, not a record of anything witnessed. Treat it as the proverb Sparta produced about itself, not as reportage.
The underlying logic is real enough, and is the reason the shield rather than the spear carries the weight. A hoplite's shield covered the man on his left as much as himself. Losing a spear was misfortune; dropping the shield broke the line. Spartan law penalised the man who threw it away, and the word for such a man, tresas, one who trembled, carried lasting disgrace.
Sources
- Plut. Mor. 241F
- Xen. Lac. 9.4-9.6
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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